Utah PHP Users Group » wade

Blazing Data with Redis

wade — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 01:46:22 +0000

For our December meeting, Justin Carmony will present on “Blazing Data with Redis.” There are several solutions about in the “NoSQL” realm, and I’ll be honest, Redis is one of my favorites. Redis is an open source, advanced key-value store. It is often referred to as a data structure server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets.

What is great about Redis is just how fast it is. In order to achieve its outstanding performance, Redis works with an in-memory dataset. Depending on your use case, you can persist it either by dumping the dataset to disk every once in a while, or by appending each command to a log.

So come down and learn the basics of Redis, whether using it as an advanced cache alternative to Memcached, a queueing system, a data store, or anything where you would benefit from high performance reads and writes.

Designing with Scalability Platforms in Mind

wade — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:56:59 +0000

For our November meeting, Joseph Brower will be visiting from Idaho to present about scalability platforms. As usual, we’ll follow it with our Applebee’s aftermeeting. We look forward to seeing you there!

As the hype around the “cloud” continues to grow, the importance of understanding how it works becomes more and more relevant. This presentation will provide an overview of how an application should be designed to ensure that it can scale well. The presentation will start with an explanation of how some cloud services work followed by things to consider when designing your application to up scale. We’ll finish the presentation (time pending) with a demonstration of a cloud driven work flow and end with a Q/A period.

The presentation will be given with the assumption that the people listening are familiar with PHP development, along with version control systems.

Scale or Fail – Give your App the Speed it Needs in the Cloud!

wade — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:43:35 +0000

For our October meeting, Grant Shipley, from Redhat, will be flying in from North Carolina to tell us about deploying PHP on ec2 using openshift, and a little about http://www.follw.it which is a site he created using Code Igniter, and why I chose PHP over Java for the follw.it site, despite being a Java developer for over 10 years.

Whether you have one or a million visitors accessing your web app, they are all going to demand a great user experience regardless of what it takes for you to deliver it. This invariably means quick page loads and fast response times every single time. When things go south, you just throw more hardware at the problem and increase your caches and buffers, right? Wrong. Toss in an infrastructure that resides on the cloud and now you’ve got a really interesting problem on your hands. I’ll leave the marketecure slides at the door, this is a hands-on technical talk in which we’ll deploy an application to the cloud and then turn up the heat by leveraging the right mix of elasticity and auto-sclaing.

Grant Shipley is an OpenShift PaaS Evangelist at Red Hat focused on cloud technologies. Prior to that, Grant was a Manager of Software Development with responsibilities over the http://www.redhat.com website and supporting infrastructure. Grant has over 10 years of software development experience focusing on Java and PHP. In his free time, he contributes to several open source projects including Media Portal and http://www.follw.it as well as developing iOS applications. Grant has been using Linux on a daily basis since 1994 and is active in the FOSS community.

Scale or Fail – Give your App the Speed it Needs in the Cloud!

wade — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 18:57:47 +0000

For our October meeting, Grant Shipley, from Redhat, will be flying in from North Carolina to
tell us about deploying PHP on ec2 using openshift, and a little about http://www.follw.it which is a site he created using Code Igniter, and why he chose PHP over Java for the follw.it site, despite being a Java developer for over 10 years.

Whether you have one or a million visitors accessing your web app,
they are all going to demand a great user experience regardless of
what it takes for you to deliver it. This invariably means quick page
loads and fast response times every single time. When things go south,
you just throw more hardware at the problem and increase your caches
and buffers, right? Wrong. Toss in an infrastructure that resides on
the cloud and now you’ve got a really interesting problem on your
hands. I’ll leave the marketecure slides at the door, this is a
hands-on technical talk in which we’ll deploy an application to the
cloud and then turn up the heat by leveraging the right mix of
elasticity and auto-sclaing.

Grant Shipley is an OpenShift PaaS Evangelist at Red Hat focused on
cloud technologies. Prior to that, Grant was a Manager of Software
Development with responsibilities over the http://www.redhat.com website and
supporting infrastructure. Grant has over 10 years of software
development experience focusing on Java and PHP. In his free time, he
contributes to several open source projects including Media Portal and
http://www.follw.it as well as developing iOS applications. Grant has been
using Linux on a daily basis since 1994 and is active in the FOSS
community.

FBI recruiter and PHP Security

wade — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 18:55:49 +0000

For our September meeting, first, we’ll have a brief presentation from a visitor from the FBI to discuss tech opportunities within their organization. Then, the main event will be Steve Meyers presenting on PHP Security. We will be giving away more UTOS Raffle Tickets.

PHP profiling

wade — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 18:26:38 +0000

For our July meeting, Justin Carmony will be teaching us some of his tips, tricks, and techniques for doing performance profiling and optimization in PHP applications. Our meeting is at 7pm on Thursday, July 21, at Center7 Networks’ Bluffdale data center, and after the meeting everyone is welcome to join us at the Draper Applebees.

If you have something you’d be willing to present at a future meeting, please let me know and we’ll get you on the schedule.

Frameworks and content management

wade — Thu, 12 May 2011 17:40:40 +0000

For our May meeting, Wade Shearer will present on frameworks and content management. He will be giving a presentation on a custom system that he developed.

Note that we will be meeting at our new (old) location, Center 7‘s new data center in Bluffdale (the old LinuxNetworx building). ID will be required for admittance.

New meeting location, starting in May

wade — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 15:28:00 +0000

Center 7, a gracious sponsor for several years has offered to bring us back home to the old Linux Networx building in Bluffdale. Center 7 purchased the building recently and added it to their list of data centers along the Wasatch Front. You might have read in the news a few months back about Twitter hosting their service (at least in part) from there. Feedback indicates that the location is more convenient for most of the group.

I’m converting video for HTML5. I’ve b…

wade — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 16:44:50 +0000

I’m converting video for HTML5. I’ve been using Miro Video Converter. It’s works great, except that the OGV files it produces aren’t working in Firefox. I’m not sure if it’s a weakness with the converter or the source file (I’m converting FLVs). I tried FireFogg and the file it produced works and, interestingly, is half the size.

There’s a new conversation happening at…

wade — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 19:03:12 +0000

There’s a new conversation happening at uphpu.org. You asked. I listened. I’ve upgraded to the P2 WordPress theme. It’s all hopped-up on ajax and social juice. Everyone can now post directly from the home page and comment inline anywhere on the site. A customized version of P2 is forthcoming, but we might was well start enjoying the benefits of this platform in the meantime.

I have deleted all user accounts with zero posts so that we may start fresh. So, if you haven’t posted or comments on uphpu.org previously, you’ll need to create a new account.