October – 2010 – techPortal

DPCRadio: Plant Pyrus in your system - A guide to a plugin system. October 27, 2010

Helgi Thormar Thobjoernsson

Anyone that has written a Content Management System or a blog system, has quickly realised that people will want to extend the functionality of the application and thus the developer has to embark on a journey to write a plugin system with everything that comes with that.

One of the biggest parts of any plugin system is the part that deals with discovery, installation, upgrading, dependency handling, infrastructure and other equally boring things. An essential part of any plugin system yet everyone dreads writing it, and few actually take on the task of writing it.

With Pyrus (the new PEAR installer) these tasks will not only be easy to do but also a joy. By embedding Pyrus in your application with its lavish new APIs you can use a tried and tested solution that hundred of thousands of people use every day on their command line, but you will be able to provide it right IN your tool, in your admin area, properly integrated with the layout and dictating the flow of the processes so it fits the ideologies of your software. Learn how to provide your users with fantastic experience, at the low price of using in the Pyrus installer in your application instead of trying to write your own solution.

Update: The slides for this talk are also available

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (95.5MB)
The EAV Data Model October 21, 2010

One problem many developers encounter while defining and analysing data requirements is the situation where a number of different attributes can be used to describe an object, but only few attributes actually apply to each one. One option is to create a table with a column representing each attribute; this is suitable for objects with a fixed number of attributes, where all or most attributes have values for a most objects. However, in our case we would end up with records where majority of columns would be empty, because attributes may be unknown or inapplicable.

To solve the above problem you can apply the EAV (Entity, Attribute, Value) model. This pattern is also known under several alternative names including "object-attribute-value" model and "open schema". In the EAV data model only non-empty values are stored in database, where each attribute-value (or key-value) pair describes one attribute of a given entity. EAV tables are often characterized as "long and skinny"; "long" refers to multiple rows describing entity, and "skinny" to the small number of columns used. In this article we will describe the EAV model, its implementation, and show applications of using it in the real world - including examining how Magento makes use of this pattern.
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DPCRadio: Advanced Git October 12, 2010

David Soria Parra

Besides OpenSource projects like the Linux Kernel, OpenJDK or Perl, companies increasingly use distributed version control systems like Git and Mercurial. Their unique features makes new and modern work-flows possible, which are particularly useful in agil development.

The talk gives a introduction to the advanced features of Git and the fundamental concepts of modern distributed version control systems.

The slides are also available

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (89.1MB)
Understanding APC October 7, 2010

APC is a performance-enhancing extension. It should not be confused with a magic pill, although having it around does provide a positive impact on performance! If configured incorrectly, APC can cause unexpected behaviour, however when implemented optimally APC can be a useful weapon in your arsenal. In this post we will examine APC's capabilities and it's application both as an opcode cache and in its less common usage as a data cache.
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