Phalcon: The journey begins
I've been a php developer for about a Decade now, and it was a fun decade. I've learned php through php 4, release of 5, and seen it evolve from the beginning. Modern day apps I've worked on have benefited greatly from the simplicity and well documented function base that php provides. I've met some of the greats of php and other web technologies in the great city of Toronto.
I've been through personally created frameworks and frameworks designed to provide a great deal of rapid start to any project. However, as the years went, PHP stopped being just an easy language to get a web project going. It evolved, with the frameworks out there. It evolved with the goal of producing lots of code very very quickly to get more and more websites live and online as fast as possible.
Trouble is those companies who got their great start with php, is now feeling the pinch of legacy php code, and framework's true limitations. If you think about how most of these frameworks handle ORM elements, it loads into php associative arrays large amounts of date. Now we go from low memory quick scripts to high memory for data greater than 50,000 records from databases. With big data, this is quite unacceptable as I've seen memory consumption go well beyond 2GB limits, on less than 5 million records.
Technologies such as redis, Mongo and few other help alleviate the issues with it, but it doesn't help solve some of php's greatest weaknesses. Ability to hold onto session across horizontally scaled servers without using single instance MySQL dbs (or mongo dbs). Ability to produce results in a multi-process way. Having multiple core machines serving up scripts that require a bit of processing is useless, unless we truly get multi-threaded processing.
We have work around technologies exist, but can php truly live up to the challenges mentions? Sadly speaking, I cannot truly answer that question at this point in time, nor is it truly the question to answer in this particular article.
I love what PHP has ultimately become. with composer, and the community, php is a force to be reckoned with. Even with all the limitations I've mentioned. I actually found a decent framework that allows me to code without taking over my every move. I can use it alongside composer quite easily. And boy is it fast. Downside, using it means you no longer can use standard servers we are so used to. What does that mean? Well simply speaking, it is an extension to be compiled on any server that needs to use it. It is the Phalcon framework.
My journey starts with the steps to compile. Or if you don't mind using a stable version already out there, there are packages already in the repositories of popular linux distributions, like Ubuntu. Just follow the link to get started: Download Phalcon.
I went with the compile options. However, that was truly the beginning of the journey. What happens next will be on the next article. However, I found Phalcon journey a little confusing to get started with, so the next article will go through some basic concepts I had to learn before I can truly start using this wonderful framework.
Cheers, see you next post.
I've been through personally created frameworks and frameworks designed to provide a great deal of rapid start to any project. However, as the years went, PHP stopped being just an easy language to get a web project going. It evolved, with the frameworks out there. It evolved with the goal of producing lots of code very very quickly to get more and more websites live and online as fast as possible.
Trouble is those companies who got their great start with php, is now feeling the pinch of legacy php code, and framework's true limitations. If you think about how most of these frameworks handle ORM elements, it loads into php associative arrays large amounts of date. Now we go from low memory quick scripts to high memory for data greater than 50,000 records from databases. With big data, this is quite unacceptable as I've seen memory consumption go well beyond 2GB limits, on less than 5 million records.
Technologies such as redis, Mongo and few other help alleviate the issues with it, but it doesn't help solve some of php's greatest weaknesses. Ability to hold onto session across horizontally scaled servers without using single instance MySQL dbs (or mongo dbs). Ability to produce results in a multi-process way. Having multiple core machines serving up scripts that require a bit of processing is useless, unless we truly get multi-threaded processing.
We have work around technologies exist, but can php truly live up to the challenges mentions? Sadly speaking, I cannot truly answer that question at this point in time, nor is it truly the question to answer in this particular article.
I love what PHP has ultimately become. with composer, and the community, php is a force to be reckoned with. Even with all the limitations I've mentioned. I actually found a decent framework that allows me to code without taking over my every move. I can use it alongside composer quite easily. And boy is it fast. Downside, using it means you no longer can use standard servers we are so used to. What does that mean? Well simply speaking, it is an extension to be compiled on any server that needs to use it. It is the Phalcon framework.
My journey starts with the steps to compile. Or if you don't mind using a stable version already out there, there are packages already in the repositories of popular linux distributions, like Ubuntu. Just follow the link to get started: Download Phalcon.
I went with the compile options. However, that was truly the beginning of the journey. What happens next will be on the next article. However, I found Phalcon journey a little confusing to get started with, so the next article will go through some basic concepts I had to learn before I can truly start using this wonderful framework.
Cheers, see you next post.
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