Month: October 2001

Patent-busting for fun and profit: Greg Brown, a software designer at the now-defunct Netobjects, helped piece together the patent mess between Adobe and Macromedia. Apparently Macromedia bought 11 patents from Netobjects earlier this month, including the patent they're hammering Adobe with. And, although Brown was unaware that Clay Basket was developed in 1995, he confirms… Continue reading Patent-busting for fun and profit:

ICANN caught red-handed. Rewrites rules to exclude disruptive influence [The Register]

Context Magazine — The Wealth of Notions. Quote: “When printing came in, everybody said we wouldn’t have to remember anything anymore because we had these cheap things called books. When I went to school, it had just stopped making Greek mandatory, and there was an outcry among parents. They said their children’s brains would turn… Continue reading Context Magazine — The Wealth of Notions

winterspeak.com: He spoke of his work and Microsoft's plans in the future. Here are my reactions. “Their execs don't seem to understand Web standards.” [Archipelago]

Can Congress Convene Online?. A proposal to create an 'electronic Congress' in times of emergency is causing some wonder up on Capitol Hill. By Noah Shachtman. [Wired News]

The recent benchmarking spree of PhpLib, ADODB, PEAR DB, Metabase and Native MySQL has brought more questions up. Here's my opinion. Designing Fast Architectures When designing a class library that is used by many people, it is important to divide your code between core and peripheral. Core code is used everywhere, so it is best… Continue reading The recent benchmarking spree of PhpLib, ADODB, PEAR DB, Metabase and Native MySQL has brought more questions up. Here's my opinion.

Designing Fast Architectures

When designing a class library that is used by many people, it is important to divide your
code between core and peripheral. Core code
is used everywhere, so it is best to reduce the feature-set of core code, and move these
nice features into the peripheral section. This makes it easy to tune the core code
for speed because the code is so simple.
Some of the class libraries
made the mistake of not dividing the code up into must-haves (core) and nice-to-haves (peripheral), so when they added features, the core code
became “polluted” with slow non-essential code that is rarely used.

Also avoid overly-complex designs with a lot of message passing and clever object hierarchies. They are great for impressing people but rarely run fast in real life. PhpLib is to be admired in that sense – it's fast and is not pretentious.

The next thing to ask ourselves is what is the natural data size when dealing with
database tables. No it is not the field or column, it is the row or 1-dimensional array.
Databases are tuned for sending records for that reason. A class library that tries to
operate at the field level is going against “nature” in that sense. Thus it comes as no
surprise that these libraries that are prepared to struggle uphill against “nature” are extremely
slow.

These design considerations are very useful and apply to most programming languages, not merely PHP. Here's a shameful confession: when I started coding ADODB, I had less than a week's programming experience in PHP; ADODB was actually my method of learning PHP. See http://phplens.com/lens/adodb/ for the benchmarks of database abstraction libraries.
[PHP Everywhere

Zeldman.  Don't cut your IT budget by using a content management system.  He does make a couple good points:  1) Interwoven and Vignette will drain you of so much $moola$ it will make your head spin and that 2) you shouldn't try Zope unless you have a Phd in computer science.  The obvious solution is to… Continue reading Zeldman