Federico Cargnelutti

Category: Programming

  • Zend Framework Automatic Dependency Tracking

    When you develop or deploy an application, dependency tracking is one of the problems you must solve. Keeping track of dependencies for every application you develop is not an easy task. To solve this problem I’ve created Zend_Debug_Include, a Zend Framework component that supports automatic dependency tracking. We all agree that dependencies cannot be maintained…

  • Essential Java Resources

    The Java platform will be celebrating its 14th birthday soon and one side-effect when a successful and ubiquitous language reaches this kind of milestone is the widespread proliferation of libraries, tools and ideas. In this article, Ted Neward tacks through the vast tides and presents a list of the key resources any up-and-coming Java developer…

  • Building desktop Linux applications with JavaScript

    During his keynote presentation at OSCON last year, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth described application extensibility as an important enabler of innovation and user empowerment. Citing the Firefox web browser and its rich ecosystem of add-ons as an example, Shuttleworth suggested that the Linux community could deliver a lot of extra value by making scriptable automation…

  • Memcached consistent hashing mechanism

    If you are using the Memcache functions through a PECL extension, you can set global runtime configuration options by specifying the values within your php.ini file. One of them is memcache.hash_strategy. This option sets the hashing mechanism used to select and specifies which hash strategy to use: Standard (default) or Consistent. It’s recommended that you…

  • Detect Replay Attacks in your Web Services

    Many threats that are common to distributed systems are common to Web services as well. There are a few specific threats associated with the Web services processing model, such as: Message replays: An attacker may re-play an entire message or a part of a SOAP message. Man in the middle attack: An attacker may view…

  • Getting Started With Message Queues

    When you’re building an infrastructure that is distributed all over the internet, you’ll come to a point where you can’t rely on synchronous remote calls that, for example, synchronize data on 2 servers: You don’t have any failover system that resends messages if something went wrong (network outages, software failures). Messages are processed over time…

  • 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…

  • Make your site run 10 times faster

    This is what Mike Peters says he can do: make your site run 10 times faster. His test bed is “half a dozen servers parsing 200,000 pages per hour over 40 IP addresses, 24 hours a day.” Before optimization CPU spiked to 90% with 50 concurrent connections. After optimization each machine “was effectively handling 500…

  • How to Build a Web Hosting Infrastructure on EC2

    Mike Brittain wrote: In the months prior to leaving Heavy, I led an exciting project to build a hosting platform for our online products on top of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).  We eventually launched our newest product at Heavy using EC2 as the primary hosting platform. We set out to build a fairly standard…

  • Designing a CMS Architecture

    François Zaninotto wrote: When faced with the alternative between an off-the-shelf CMS or a custom development, many companies pick solutions like ezPublish or Drupal. In addition to being free, these CMS seem to fulfill all possible requirements. But while choosing an open-source solution is a great idea, going for a full-featured CMS may prove more…

  • Seven practices for healthier, faster software development

    The practices discussed in this article are based on Ezequiel Cuellar’s observations. These practices will help any software development team as they come up against common obstacles. They will also contribute to a solid foundation for healthier development and help speed up production. The seven practices are: Improve business processes before starting development. Create a…

  • Code Refactoring Guidelines

    In software engineering, “refactoring” source code means modifying it without changing its behaviour, and is sometimes informally referred to as “cleaning it up”. Refactoring neither fixes bugs nor adds new functionality, though it might precede either activity. Rather it improves the understandability of the code and changes its internal structure and design, and removes dead…

  • Favour object composition over class inheritance

    What does “favour composition over inheritance” mean, and why is it a good thing to do? Object composition and inheritance are two techniques for reusing functionality in object-oriented systems. In general, object composition should be favoured over inheritance. It promotes smaller, more focused classes and smaller inheritance hierarchies. Troels Knak-Nielsen wrote: Class inheritance is a…

  • Whatever you write today will become legacy

    Whatever you write today will become legacy. Legacy code is often written by people who thought they got it nailed, and later realize that the application is legacy. Not because of the application itself, but because of changes in themselves. “What the hell was I thinking?” Code is always the same, it’s your perception of…

  • Identifying Senior Software Engineers

    For HR and legal purposes, most development companies classify Software Engineers into ranks from 1 to 4 (or 5). The higher the rank, the higher the responsibilities, expectations, independence and pay grade. To cut it as an interviewer and manager, you’ll need to classify people accurately with a minimum amount of direct personal exposure: a…

  • Working with legacy code

    Most projects carry some amount of legacy code. You can’t work very fast with a legacy code base, but you can speed it up if you establish a strategy to deal with your existing code and mitigate risk as new development goes forward. What is Legacy Code? Legacy code is code from the past, maintained…

  • Software Development Cycles

    The inside details of the software development cycle: Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free. Product is tested. 20 bugs are found. Programmer fixes 10 of the bugs and explains to the testing department that the other 10 aren’t really bugs. Testing department finds that five of the fixes didn’t work and discovers 15 new…

  • 14 Ways to Learn From Creative Programmers

    Programmers are a great example of thinking outside the box because, well, programmers can actually create the box. If you’ve ever spent more than two minutes talking with a programmer about his work, you’ll find out very quickly that programmers have a passion for what they do. They eat, sleep and breathe programming. Read more:…

  • 10 concepts that every software engineer should know

    In this post, Alex Iskold discusses the top 10 concepts software engineers should know. A successful software engineer knows and uses design patterns, actively refactors code, writes unit tests and religiously seeks simplicity. Beyond the basic methods, there are concepts that good software engineers know about. These transcend programming languages and projects – they are…

  • FileSyncTask: Using Phing to synchronize files and directories

    I needed to automate the task of synchronizing files from one server to another, so I wrote a Phing task. Finally today I found some time to finish writing the documentation. Overview FileSyncTask is a Phing extension for Unix systems which synchronizes files and directories from one location to another while minimizing data transfer. FileSyncTask…