Federico Cargnelutti

Month: June 2008

  • Flickr Architecture

    Flickr Platform PHP MySQL Shards Memcached for a caching layer. Squid in reverse-proxy for html and images. Linux (RedHat) Smarty for templating Perl PEAR for XML and Email parsing ImageMagick, for image processing Java, for the node service Apache SystemImager for deployment Ganglia for distributed system monitoring Subcon stores essential system configuration files in a…

  • A Modular Approach to Web Development

    MVC is about loose-coupling, and Modular Programming takes that concept to the extreme. A modular application can dynamically load and unload modules at runtime, completely separate applications in their own right, which interact with the main application and other modules to perform some set of tasks. In this article you will presented with a different…

  • Foundations of Programming: Building Better Software

    Karl Seguin has released the official, and completely free, Foundations of Programming eBook. Although simplistic, every programming decision I make is largely based on maintainability. Maintainability is the cornerstone of enterprise development. Frequent readers are likely sick of hearing about it, but there’s a good reason we talk about maintainability so often – it’s the…

  • Create professional-looking charts quickly and easily with pChart

    pChart is a PHP class oriented framework designed to create aliased charts. Data can be retrieved from SQL queries, CSV files, or manually provided. To have a complete overview of what pChart can do for you, we invite you to take a look on the on-line documentation which is trying to show all basic &…

  • Is this the future of Web application development?

    Drag and drop widgets to build Web applications, in minutes, with minimal code. WaveMaker Visual Ajax Studio is an easy-to-use visual builder that enables the drag & drop assembly of scalable, web-applications using Ajax widgets, web services and databases. WaveMaker Studio will look and feel especially familiar to client/server developers who are used to working…

  • Learn to Build Robust, Scalable and Maintainable Applications using MVC

    MVC is about loose-coupling, and Modular Programming takes that concept to the extreme. A modular application can dynamically load and unload modules at runtime, completely separate applications in their own right, which interact with the main application and other modules to perform some set of tasks This document (PDF) discusses the classes and interfaces of…

  • Agile Database Deployment Using Phing

    Phing allows you to use SQL to define changes to your database schema, making it possible to use a version control system to keep things synchronized with the actual code. A common way to automate development and deployment tasks is by writing shell scripts, however, Phing provides some advantages over shell scripts for task automation.…

  • Unit Testing: Rules of Thumb

    When it comes to testing, Cedric Beust (co-author of “Next Generation Java Testing”) lives by the following rules of thumb: “Tests first” or “tests last” is unimportant as long as there are tests. Try to think about testing as early as possible in your development process. Don’t listen to people who tell you to write…

  • The best code is very shy

    The best code is very shy. Like a four-year old hiding behind a mother’s skirt, code should not reveal too much of itself and should not be too nosy into others affairs. But you might find that your shy code grows up too fast, shedding its demure shyness in favor of wild promiscuity. When code…

  • Web Applications: Spaghetti Code for the 21st Century

    The software industry is currently in the middle of a paradigm shift. Applications are increasingly written for the Web rather than for any specific type of an operating system, computer or device. Unfortunately, the technologies used for Web application development today violate well-known software engineering principles. Furthermore, they have reintroduced problems that had already been…

  • Getters and setters create unnecessary coupling

    Every getter and setter in your code represents a failure to encapsulate and creates unnecessary coupling. A profusion of getters and setters (also referred to as accessors, accessor methods, and properties) is a sign of a poorly designed set of classes. “Getters and setters should be avoided because they break the encapsulation OOP offers”, says…

  • 10 great articles for optimizing MySQL queries

    Optimization is a complex task because ultimately it requires understanding of the entire system to be optimized. Although it may be possible to perform some local optimizations with little knowledge of your system or application, the more optimal you want your system to become, the more you must know about it. The following 10 articles…

  • Analysis of coupling within the Zend Framework

    Neil Grab wrote: One of the Zend Framework’s strongest drawing cards, as I see it, is its loosely-coupled structure. The name Zend Framework may be a misnomer, in fact, as ZF is more a set of reusable libraries than an actual application framework. I won’t go into detail about the advantages of loose coupling, but…

  • Design Patterns Quick Reference

    Jason McDonald posted some quick reference diagrams for the Gang of Four design patterns on his blog. Each section has the name of the pattern, a quick description, and the class diagram for the pattern. Definitely a handy thing to have around. Design Patterns Quick Reference (PDF)

  • The World’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language

    …has become the world’s most popular programming language. This is the story of JavaScript Most languages die in obscurity. Only a few are able to build a following beyond a single project or company. And only a very small number of languages become important. There are many things that a programmer must consider when selecting…

  • Next generation data storage with CouchDB

    Most digital data we deal with in the real world is not inherently relational in nature, yet most web applications use a SQL RDBMS for data persistence. CouchDB is fundamentally a different type of database, storing data as independent “Document” objects. They can be easily replicated to other instances of CouchDB for distributed and offline…