So in conjunction with a Enterprise Scale SaaS Application I have been developing in Zend Framework for the past few months; I have frequently been aggravated by the speed at which my unit tests run.
So as a test I disabled all my logging faculties; Code coverage and tests. To my surprise the tests run in mere seconds instead of minutes!
I have bounced around alot of different operating systems over the years, My favorites being Linux and OSX. However my favorite window manager for linux was always KDE, I never really got used to the ‘task bar’ being on top feel of GNOME, it just felt too ‘anti-windows’. Well recently, after seeing how KDE failed for me I decided to try the off the self ubuntu live CD, and let me just say ZOMG! GNOME has been completely revamped (finally!) with a left site launcher gives similarities to the osx launcher in some ways.
I’ve read at least one book now and more than a few articles suggesting and upselling Capistrano as a great platform for deploying PHP Web Applications to Staging and Production environments. Its always been one of those “Wow that looks great I should try that” but never moving forward with it due to time constraints, girlfriend, Xbox 360 etc etc.
However, recently through a project I’m working on I got to use a great web application called Beanstalk. Let me tell you this thing is pretty amazing and easy and with off the shelf SVN integration you can have a versioned project with automatic or manual deployments setup in minutes. The manual deployment is nifty in and of itself; you can deploy using the web interface or with a comment ([deploy: staging]). The price packages don’t seem bad either for what you can do so simply.
Check out Beanstalk !
* No I haven’t received anything for making this post, just thought it was something neat that I could share with my fellow dev community
This evening while trying to optimize a site that sync’s data from a database to a remote SOAP WebService I gained a 23 second improvement by using PHP’s SOAP Extension instead of NUSOAP as it was previously using. This is pretty amazing as far as I’m concerned! I wonder what is going on with NUSOAP. Its understood that there are several factors here but going from 25 seconds to 3 is HUGE!
Its also understood that NuSoap is a Script Library (see framework) for accessing Web Services where the PHP5 Soap Client Extension is not available but given the performance comparison I don’t think there is any choice!
So I have been crazy busy again and haven’t had time to write again. Trying to find the time to post regularly and do something with the root domain: we’ll see how that all works out. Stay tuned !