ZendCon has been consistently good, and I look forward to attending again this year... see you there?

Microcontroller Simulation in Python

This talk will present Py65, my open-source simulation of a small microcomputer system based on the MOS 6502. The 6502 is a very famous microprocessor that was used in early microcomputers like the Commodore 64, but its design has stood up for over 30 years. Cores based on the 6502 are now widely used in embedded devices, with WDC estimating annual volumes in the hundreds of millions of units.

Using Python and software tools such as Py65, low-level software for embedded systems can be developed and tested much faster. This talk will discuss the design and implementation of Py65, how it and tools like it can help, and will also touch on other Python libraries that can assist with embedded development.

URL Mapping with Routes

Routes is a Python package that provides a solution to the problem, “how do I map URLs to my code?” Its solution is an interesting one, and is actually a re-implementation of a feature from Ruby on Rails. Routes itself has also now been ported to PHP 5 as part of the Horde project. Routes is used by the Pylons web framework and other frameworks in Python, and is relatively easy to use as a standalone package.

The Routes method of URL dispatch is based around pattern matching rather than object publishing. For those new to Routes, we’ll have an introduction to the basic Routes concepts and how it works. We’ll also dive into the Routes internals and follow some URLs through their recognition phase, learning about how Routes does it job along the way. Web developers and framework implementers alike will gain a better understanding of Routes and how to use it effectively.

I'm particularly excited about this webinar, as I've been developing a sample pastebin application to show off a number of features; the webinar will feature some screencasts showing the new code in action, and promises to be much more dynamic than my typical "bullet point and code" presentations.

I'm also going to show some techniques to use when developing with ZF+Dojo, including how to create custom builds once you're ready to deploy your application (and why you want to do so).

Register today!

I had a good flight through Amsterdam to Edinburgh, the real nerves started when my luggage did not appear on the baggage belt. Apparently I had missed it and it had fallen off in the back, out of sight. After being reunited with my bags slightly later and getting the car I made the arduous trip to the "hotel". The "hotel" was the Heriot-Watt campus, which was neither sign-posted or easy to find. After making a few circles through the neighbourhood, I managed to find it. However, finding the campus wasn't the only issue -- 30 minutes later I finally had found the reception in a pitch black night. Sleep commenced very soon after that.

I got up early in the morning for a light breakfast and unhappily discovered that it was raining. Not something you should be surprised about in Scotland. I took the bus into town to meet up with Lorna and after a cup of tea Scott as well. Without any real plan we wandered around the city and taking in the views. This quickly turned into looking for food. While having some drinks over lunch we chatted a bit more, and more walking occurred in the afternoon. We got tired, had some more drinks and by that time Lorna had to leave for home again.

Scott and I dropped of our gear at his room and went looking for a comedy show to go to. The Edinburgh Fringe festival was happening, so the biggest problem was to which of the 640 shows we wanted to go. We settled for "Des Clarke - Desire" at the Pleasance Courtyard. After a cup of tea in a café full of loonies, we left for the show. We had a great time, although his accent was sometimes a bit hard to understand for me. A cab brought me back to the "hotel".

After sleeping in a little bit, I took the bus again to downtown Edinburgh. I took a quick bite to give me strength to visit the Edinburgh castle. I took the long route through Princess Gardens up the hill. The queue for tickets took a little over hand an hour. The tour at the castle itself, was interrupted by the occasional shower, but the weather had improved a lot since the previous day. The castle is a must see. I liked the "prison of war" exhibitions best, and the crown jewels where the anti-climax.

After visiting the castle I was quite hungry and went to have a lunch of stir fried scallops at the Mussels hut. With the new found energy I climbed Caston hill. The last hours in Edinburgh I spend at the various street theaters of the fringe. After a light dinner at "bar One", consisting of swordfish and an apple/carrot salad I left back by bus to the Heriot-Watt campus.

Edinburgh to the Isle of Arran, August 11th, 2008

I started the day with a simple though hearty breakfast at the newly opened Mensa. From the hotel I travelled first slightly south to visit Roslyn's chapel. Unfortunately the chapel is mostly hidden by a roof to protect it from the rain. Inside photography was not allowed, so I didn't manage to take any pictures. In the church I listened to a guide explaining all the interesting art from the chapel. From pagan green men, the apprentice pillar and the Hollywood circle, the church appeared to house much more than I expected. From the church I left for Falkirk, home of the Falkirk Wheel.

The wheel replaces many locks between the Union and Forth and Clyde canals, and is quite an engineering feat. For some time there was even some blue sky which made watching the wheel turn more pleasant. I continued my journey after a quick lunch towards Glasgow and to Ardrossan where I would take the ferry to the Isle of Arran. I was a bit early and wandered about the really windy harbour. They also tried to fool me that my ferry would be two hours later, but that I didn't go for. The trip of the Firth of Clyde was windy, bumpy and slight sunny.

When I got the Brodrick on the other side, I shopped for essential energy suppliers for the upcoming walks around the island. I was staying at the Catacol Bay hotel on the northern point of the island, where I had breaded haddock for lunch. The wine that came with it "forced" me to walk around a bit along the windy coast. The heavy rain that had plummeted down when I arrived was gone. Before I went to bed I prepared a bit for the hikes of the following day.

Isle of Arran, August 12th, 2008

Hiking on an empty stomach doesn't work, but a full Scottish breakfast might be a bit too close to suicide. Way too much artery clogging goodness for me. Of course, the rain had returned but that was not going to stop me from a little hike around the "Cock of Arran". From my "parking place" I spotted a few seals, but they were obviously not

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It's been interesting and led me to try to understand a lot more about how the Zend engine works. I spent a lot of time reading some sections of the code, and using my favourite technique (yes, I'm sorry - it's printf()) to understand how things work.

After one particularly frustrating day I asked a colleague (Andy Wharmby) about the issue I was looking at. Then a miracle happened - he'd not only looked at it but had documented it (and many other things) in a set of charts.

When I read the charts a lot of things I didn't understand got clearer - so, with Andy's permission - I'm making his work available to the PHP world in case other people find them as useful as I did. You can download them in Open Office format here.

Andy asked me to make it clear that he wrote the charts almost two years ago, so there may be bits that are out of date, or even just plain wrong. If you see things that need to be fixed please send me a mail (zoe@php.net) and I'll be happy to update the slides. Andy made extensive use of Sara Golemon's blog posts and tools written by Sara and Derick Rethans. Apart from that, like me, he used printf() and a debugger to look at the source for the engine.

I know that Gwynne is working on internals documentation for PHP, I am really looking forward to that. These charts, although very useful, are no substitute for a well written manual section!

Just like we should aspire to use renewable energy sources to help the health of the planet, we should also use reusable software elements to create robust, healthy code for our customers. Eco-friendly practices might be thought of as applicable to software devlopment. Just as we are concerned with the various biota and climate of the planet, we should be concerned with the over-all health of the software eco-system.

How does Midgard sit in with these ideas? Well, the current version of it does not. MidCOM 2 is a heavy, enterprise-oriented CMS framework that requires big machines, or even clusters to run.

But things are quite different in Midgard 2 land. We have rewritten the MidCOM framework from scratch, removing the need to have abstractions on top of abstractions to support the shift from classic Midgard APIs to the new ones, and from PHP4 to more object-oriented PHP versions. We have also focused on simplicity and adaptability, to make MidCOM an easier environment to work with for site developers.

While MidCOM3 is not due to be out before next March, Tero Heikkinen, an early adopter has been building some production sites with it already. And his experiences state that not only the performance is much better, but also it requires much less work from programmers.

I know Rasmus' argument is that frameworks are evil by requiring developers to adopt to their own concepts, and by introducing unnecessary overhead. But we should look beyond mere server-level productivity, and take programmer productivity into account. A framework makes things much easier for agile teams, enabling people with different competences to work in their isolated environments. Programmers can work on the code, and designers on the templates for instance.

While this makes the actual development and deployment process more efficient, how much performance is lost due to the framework?

Lies, damn lies and benchmarks

Like Rasmus, I used an APC-cached simple PHP "hello world" file as the baseline for my benchmarks. On my dog slow MacBook Air, the simple PHP file was able to serve 32.91 requests per second.

MidCOM3, when run on Midgard 8.09 with APC and memcached was able to serve 8.90 request per second, or in other words performed at 27% of the plain PHP file. Not too good, but considered that much SQL is run to serve a Midgard page, there are good explanations at this.

But compared to Drupal, which I did not install but instead calculated the performance based on the difference between my baseline (32.91 r/s) and Rasmus' (611.78 r/s), MidCOM3 was doing quite fine. Drupal would only be serving about 2.5 requests per second on my box. Zend Framework, again calculated from Rasmus' data would provide 6.5 request per second.

And this is not all. Piotr Pokora has done a stellar work with Midgard2, which will come out in spring numbered 9.03. With it, MidCOM's numbers were quite a lot be

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An internal LaunchAnywhere application error has occured and this application cannot proceed. (LAX)

Stack Trace:
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Malformed \uxxxx encoding.
at java.util.Properties.loadConvert(Unknown Source)
at java.util.Properties.load(Unknown Source)
at com.zerog.common.java.util.PropertiesUtil.loadProperties(DashoA8113)
at com.zerog.lax.LAX.(DashoA8113)
at com.zerog.lax.LAX.main(DashoA8113)

Here’s my review of it:

The book was published prior to Facebook’s facelift but this doesn’t really impact on the usefulness of the book.
An overview of FBML, FQL, FBJS (a restricted subset of JavaScript and enforced for security reasons) are given along with information on how to use the test consoles, publish to news feeds, some multimedia aspects of what can be done in Facebook applications and more.

Happily the book focuses on using PHP5 for developing Facebook Applications - while there are classes available for developing FB apps with PHP4 there really is no point in doing so; especially now that official support for PHP4 was withdrawn last month.
MySQL appears to be the database system of choice for the examples and Linux/Unix oriented solutions for scheduling tasks to occur regularly are given - some Windows screenshots feature in chapter one with regard to setting up the client libraries for local development but other than that everything else is unix-centric.

I found “Facebook Application Development” more useful than facebook’s own documentation with regard to the main aspects of developing a Facebook application - it is written well and easier to follow than the online documentation and while it is true to say that the Facebook Platform is evolving I am of the opinion that Heyder and Bain’s work will still be applicable for a long time.