Federico Cargnelutti

Category: Tools

  • Website performance monitoring tool

    Monitoring systems allow you to monitor changes to your front-end code base over time, catching any regression issues and monitoring the ongoing effects of any performance optimisation changes. Easy to use dashboards are a must when it comes to monitoring the state of your web apps. Companies like Calibre or SpeedCurve offer this as a…

  • Check whether your web server is correctly configured

    Last year Zone-H reported a record number of 1.5 million websites defacements. 1 million of those websites where running Apache. When it comes to configuring a web server, some people tend to turn everything on by default. Developers are happy because the functionality that they wanted is available without any extra configuration, and there is…

  • Command-line memcached stat reporter

    Nicholas Tang wrote a nice little perl script that shows a basic memcached top display for a list of servers. You can specify thresholds, for instance, and it’ll change color to red if you exceed the thresholds. You can also choose the refresh/sleep time, and whether to show immediate (per second) stats, or lifetime stats.…

  • Apache HTTP DoS tool released

    Yesterday an interesting HTTP DoS tool has been released. The tool performs a Denial of Service attack on Apache (and some other, see below) servers by exhausting available connections. While there are a lot of DoS tools available today, this one is particularly interesting because it holds the connection open while sending incomplete HTTP requests…

  • Google Page Speed: Web Performance Best Practices

    When you profile a web page with Page Speed, it evaluates the page’s conformance to a number of different rules. These rules are general front-end best practices you can apply at any stage of web development. Google provides documentation of each of the rules, so whether or not you run the Page Speed tool, you can refer…

  • Real Time Web-Based Service Monitoring Tool

    phpWatch is a general purpose service monitor that is able to send notifications of outages via e-mail or text-message (SMS). The purpose of this system is to allow administrators to easily check the status of many different services running on any number of servers and also allow developers to interface with the query and notification…

  • Fabric: Simple Pythonic Deployment Tool

    Here’s the thing: you’re developing a server deployed application, it could be a web application but it doesn’t have to be, and you’re probably deploying to more than one server. Even if you just have one server to deploy to, it still get tiresome in the long run to build your project, fire up your…

  • Using Unison to synchronize more than two machines

    Rsync is great, however, it only synchronizes files in one direction. Unison, on the other hand, synchronizes both ways. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts, modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other. Why…

  • Scrum Backlog Templates

    Here are two useful backlog templates provided by Agile Software Development. Both of them are in Excel format (XLS). Check them out: Simple Product Backlog Example Simple Sprint Backlog Example

  • Developing cross-platform Adobe AIR desktop applications

    This weekend I decided to spend some time developing my first cross-platform Adobe AIR desktop application. My first impression of Adobe Air was: Wow! It takes only a few minutes to see how easy and powerful this platform is. What’s great about AIR is that you can build Rich Internet Applications that run across operating…

  • MySQL Master-Master Replication Manager

    The MySQL Master-Master replication (often in active-passive mode) is popular pattern used by many companies using MySQL for scale out. Most of the companies would have some internal scripts to handle things as automatic fallback and slave cloning but no Open Source solution was made available. In 2007, the High Performance Group at MySQL AB…

  • 6 Different Ways to Testing a Web Service

    This tutorial by Charitha Kankanamge takes you through different approaches to testing Web services. There are multiple approaches to invoking Web services, regardless of the platform or technology used to built such services. If a service consumer has access to the contract (WSDL) file of a given Web service, then, that particular service can be…

  • Google gives away a free web application security scanner

    Google announced the release of ratproxy, a passive web application security assessment tool that they’ve been using internally at Google. This utility, developed by their information security engineering team, is designed to transparently analyse legitimate, browser-driven interactions with a tested web property and automatically pinpoint, annotate, and prioritize potential flaws or areas of concern. 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 20 Most Influential Open-Source Web Applications

    From managing databases to shopping, writing blogs to sending emails. Ten years of passion, great software architectures, team work and revolutionary ideas. Here are the most influential open-source PHP applications to date: 1998 phpMyAdmin phpMyAdmin is a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the Web. Currently it can create…

  • 13 reasons why UML failed

    One of the reasons is that UML attempts to become a programming language. By aiming to be able to generate full code actually UML tries to be a programming language. In my mind there is a big problem with a general purpose graphical programming language. In human history the written form of all languages evolved…