Category: Web Development

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Web Development

Facebook’s HipHop For PHP

I mentioned the other day that Facebook was about to open source a method for speeding up PHP. Today they announced HipHop a code transformation tool that converts PHP into C++ and compiles using g++. There is apparently a server component to this strategy as well.

I’m slightly skeptical that this approach will have much more success than the other attempts in the past. This approach may make sense for Facebook, but I don’t think it will pay off for most smaller (relatively speaking) sites.

I think for most users doing something similar to the Unladen Swallow, an effort for Python which is trying to build a custom virtual machine with a JIT built on top of LLVM would be best. Perhaps even Nanojit could be a potential option.

I suspect HipHop will be a fork more than anything else. Regardless it’s a pretty cool project and some really interesting technology.

Categories
Web Development

Facebook’s New PHP “Runtime”

According to SDTimes Facebook is about to release a new open source project where it has either re-written the PHP Runtime (unlikely) or built a PHP compiler (more likely).

There is another possibility. It could be a Zend extension acting as an opcode cache (APC, XCache, etc.) and a FastCGI replacement.

It’s also possible they used Quercus as either a starting point or inspiration and it’s actually Java based, but that sounds unlikely.

Regardless, it will be interesting to see what comes of this.

Categories
Web Development

JavaScript Flash Implementation

I meant to post this last week already. Gordon is a JavaScript implementation of Flash. You read that right. It’s written in JavaScript and executes swf files. It’s performance isn’t the same as the Flash player, but it’s surprisingly good.

This is really cool stuff. With JavaScript performance improving people are really starting to demo things that a few years ago were laughable.

Yes I know this is the second Flash related post today, but this is pretty cool.

Categories
Google Security Web Development

The Future Of SSL

Google announced the other day that it will now enable HTTPS by default on Gmail. Previously a user had to either manually type in HTTPS or change a setting to default to it, something most people likely never bothered to do. Google says it’s not related but it seems oddly coincidental that this chance coincides with its China announcement.

However Gmail using HTTPS is not the big story here.

The big story is that HTTPS is now being used in places where it before was considered excessive. Once upon only financial information was generally sent over HTTPS. As time went on, so did most website login pages, though the rest of the sites often were unencrypted. The reason for being so selective is that it’s more costly to scale HTTPS due to it’s CPU usage on the server-side, and it’s performance on the client side. These days CPU is becoming very cheap.

In the next few years I think we’ll see more and more of the web switch to using HTTPS. If things like network neutrality don’t work this trend could accelerate at an even quicker rate just like it did for P2P using MSE/PE to mask traffic.

Like I said, these days the CPU impact is pretty affordable, however the performance impact due to HTTP handshaking can be pretty substantial. Minimizing HTTP requests obviously helps. HTTP Keepalive is a good solution however that generally results in more child processes on the server as they aren’t freed as quickly (read: more memory needed).

Mobile is a whole different ballgame since CPU is still more limited. I’m not aware of any mobile devices that have hardware to specifically handle SSL, which does exist for servers. Add in the extra latency and mobile really suffers. Perhaps it’s time to re-examine how various Crypto libraries are optimized for running on ARM hardware? I think the day will come where performance over SSL will matter as it becomes more ubiquitous.

Categories
Mozilla Web Development

Microsoft Joins W3C SVG Working Group

Microsoft is joining the W3C SVG Working Group. Presumably that means there’s some interest in SVG for IE or Silverlight or both. I wonder what led to the change of heart.

I pretty much wrote off any chance of SVG being mainstream in 2005 when Adobe bought Macromedia. Adobe was previously somewhat of a SVG pusher, but Macromedia obviously is the home of Flash. As expected the SVG love dried up. The gap that Adobe filled was adding support for SVG to IE. If IE supports it natively that’s a game changer.

Gecko already has decent support for SVG. WebKit has support for a while. Opera has support as well. Without analyzing in too much detail there should be a subset that’s usable across current browsers and hopefully IE by the time IE 9.0 ships.

I must admit given the choice I’m still more interested in Microsoft supporting <canvas/>, but no word on that as of yet. I’m still hopeful.

Hooray for web standards!

Categories
Google Mozilla Web Development

Adventures With document.documentElement.firstChild

Here’s an interesting DOM test-case I ran across inadvertently yesterday.

For the purpose of this post assume the following markup:

< !DOCTYPE HTML>
<HTML>
<!– i broke the DOM –>
<head>
    <meta HTTP-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
    <title>Testcase</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>Something</p>
</body>
</HTML>

If I use document.documentElement.firstChild I don’t get consistent behavior. In Firefox and IE I get the <head/> element, which is what I was initially expecting. In WebKit (Safari/Chrome) and Opera. I get the HTML comment which I wasn’t.

Continue reading “Adventures With document.documentElement.firstChild”
Categories
Google Web Development

Google Is Moving Away From Google Gears

LA Times is reporting:

“We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites,” wrote a Google spokesman in an e-mail.

I complained a while back that things seemed too fragmented. To date I’ve been pretty leery of things because I wouldn’t want to support two competing methods or require users to either download Google Gears or use a browser that supports cutting edge technologies. It’s either too much effort and code footprint, or too much effort from the user perspective to download another binary.

A few Google folks replied to my earlier blog post and noted that they fully intended to work towards convergence. I’m glad it’s finally becoming a reality. I hope Google Gears will continue to be developed for the purpose of filling in missing functionality for certain browsers that tend to fall behind and simply let the browser take over if and when it eventually supports that functionality. That would create a consistent environment across platforms and browsers.

Categories
Mozilla Web Development

Browser Detection In JavaScript Libraries

I was curious what browser detection in various JS libraries look like. While we always try to avoid doing browser detection, it’s sometimes a necessary evil. Here’s what I found.

Continue reading “Browser Detection In JavaScript Libraries”
Categories
Networking Open Source Web Development

Yahoo Traffic Server Open Sourced

Way back in 2002 Yahoo acquired Inktomi who was largely know for their search products. Their software powered some early search engines like HotBot in the pre-Google days. One of their lesser known products was something called Traffic Server. Even if it was lesser known it was still used by ISP’s including AOL, who in those days was big. Their business disappeared with the great bubble and they were acquired by Yahoo, who was using Traffic Server themselves ever since.

Fast forward to 2009. Yahoo is now in the process of opening up Traffic Server as an Apache project. It’s already in incubator. Yahoo says it’s capable of 30,000 requests per server. Noteworthy is that this runs on generic hardware.

These days most websites use either Squid, Nginx, Pound or Varinish on the open source side. On the proprietary side there’s Citrix NetScaler, Foundry (now Brocade) ServerIron, Zeus ZXTM or F5’s Big-IP. The proprietary side can be either expensive software running on generic hardware or an appliance (which is generally a Intel based server with a custom modified Linux install for low maintenance and top performance).

At this point it’s apparently not 64-bit and doesn’t have native IPv6 support. However it appears to be usable and likely competitive with some of the other stuff out there already. Yahoo has been using it all along, and I hear they are pretty popular (problems aside).

It should be noted that commercial CDN’s aren’t really an alternative for reverse proxy or load balancer since they still require a robust and redundant origin. If anything they will reduce your requirements, not eliminate them.

Given everyone’s interest in scaling computing quickly and cheaply this is pretty noteworthy open source event. It tends to be an afterthought but these applications can be critical. Squid handles 78% of Wikipedia’s requests. Given all their traffic, you can see how it matters.

It will be interesting to see if a community builds around Traffic Server and if it sees adoption.

Categories
Blog Web Development

10 Years

Looking at my calendar (which includes things like domain renewals) I noticed that I’ve owned this domain for a decade.

   Domain Name: ACCETTURA.COM
   Registrar: NETWORK SOLUTIONS, LLC.
   Whois Server: whois.networksolutions.com
   Referral URL: http://www.networksolutions.com
   Name Server: NS1.ACCETTURA.COM
   Name Server: NS2.ACCETTURA.COM
   Name Server: NS3.ACCETTURA.COM
   Name Server: NS5.ACCETTURA.COM
   Name Server: NS6.ACCETTURA.COM
   Name Server: NS7.ACCETTURA.COM
   Status: clientTransferProhibited
   Updated Date: 05-sep-2008
   Creation Date: 13-sep-1999
   Expiration Date: 13-sep-2012

In 1999 Bill Clinton was president, Lance Armstrong won his first Tour de France, David Cone pitched a perfect game for the Yankees, NATO bombed Yugoslavia, John F. Kennedy Jr. died in a plane crash, Melissa Worm tormented the web, the Euro was just established, Napster just debuted, Windows 98 Second Edition launched, Apple just announced the iBook (Jun) and Power Macintosh G4 (Aug).

I wonder what will be nostalgic in September 2019.