Recently, got an opportunity to do some implementation using Ajax and PHP. Having previously used NetBeans IDE 6.1/6.5 for PHP, it was an obvious choice to come back to NetBeans IDE again.

Although, I am yet to download the latest version, I am currently using 6.8 and I enjoyed every bit of it, while playing with CSS and jQuery for the first time, while implementing Ajax with PHP.

As I am gonna stay with PHP for sometime now, so I guess I better get my NetBeans IDE upgraded, before I miss out on any useful features.

It’s good to be back

As I updated my website, migrating from Drupal to WordPress, a welcome news followed in the evening when Swansea beating Manchester City 1-0. The female assistant to the referee, Sian Massey, gladly judging Micah Richards for an offside. United had a rough time taking over WBA, but ensuring a relatively comfortable 2-0.

MySQL Cluster has long been used in telecommunications network services for Subscriber Data Management (HLR/HSS), Service Delivery Platforms and Value-Added Services, and has also been deployed in certain parts of general web infrastructure.

Following the announcements of MySQL Cluster 7.2 General Availability, including new benchmarks demonstrating MySQL Cluster delivering 1 Billion Queries per Minute, I thought it might be worthwhile to highlight examples of use cases for MySQL Cluster .

Web-Based Payment & Financial Services Platforms

MySQL Cluster can be deployed across a range of applications including payment gateways, trading systems …

Note: I’ve decided not to use Veewee due to silly compatibility issues for now.

Quoting from Vagrant’s web site:

Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments. By providing automated creation and provisioning of virtual machines using Oracle’s VirtualBox, Vagrant provides the tools to create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable virtual environments.

A complementary technology called Veewee makes building VirtualBox VMs easier by automating away a lot of manual steps. Marius Ducea has a great blog post on how to use it.

My observations:
1. According to Vagrant’s web site, it should work on Windows. I’ve …

In early 2006 Paul Hurley (ideeli’s CEO) and I (Mark Uhrmacher, CTO) were thinking about a new business. We had the idea to create a community based around great deals for Women’s fashion products where we saw a great deal of potential for great content and product sales. Now, over five years later, we’ve realized much of that vision. Our business success has been chronicled over the years in several places (see here and here). Though we’re very proud of our achievements there, that isn’t what this blog is about.

Insatiable Demand is about a mostly untold story. Over the past five-plus years we’ve built a phenomenal technology platform and team. From two people and three servers to a 70 person team and a 100 instance production environment, …

XKCD (as usual) makes a very good point – this time about password strength, and I reckon it’s something app developers need to consider urgently. Geeks can debate the exact amount of entropy, but that’s not really the issue: insisting on mixed upper/lower and/or non-alpha and/or numerical components to a user password does not really improve security, and definitely makes life more difficult for users.

So basically, the functions that do a “is this a strong password” should seriously reconsider their approach, particularly if they’re used to have the app decide whether to accept the password as “good enough” at all.

Update: Jeff Preshing has written an xkcd password generator. Users probably should choose their own four …

Supporting successful services on the web means scaling your back-end databases across multiple dimensions. This blog focuses on scaling access methods to your data using SQL and/or NoSQL interfaces.

In Part 1 of the blog series , I discussed scaling database performance using auto-sharding and active/active geographic replication in MySQL Cluster to enable applications to scale both within and across data centers.  

In Part 2, I discussed the need to scale operational agility to keep pace with demand, which includes being able to add capacity and performance to the database, and to evolve the schema – all without downtime.

So in this blog I want …

In my previous post, I discussed scaling web database performance in MySQL Cluster using auto-sharding and active/active geographic replication - enabling users to scale both within and across data centers.  

I also mentioned that while scaling write-performance of any web service is critical, it is only 1 of multiple dimensions to scalability, which include:

- The need to scale operational agility to keep pace with demand. This means being able to add capacity and performance to the database, and to evolve the schema – all without downtime;

- The need to scale queries by having flexibility in the APIs used to access the database – including SQL and NoSQL interfaces;

- The need to scale the database while maintaining continuous availability.

All of these subjects are discussed in more detail in …

The realities of today’s successful web services are creating new demands that many legacy databases were just not designed to handle:

- The need to scale writes, as well as reads, both within and across geographically dispersed data centers;

- The need to scale operational agility to keep pace with database load and application requirements. This means being able to add capacity and performance to the database, and to evolve the schema – all without downtime;

- The need to scale queries by having flexibility in the APIs used to access the database;

- The need to scale the database while maintaining continuous availability for both failures as well as scheduled maintenance events.

Each of the requirements above warrant their own dedicated blog, which I’ll find time to write over the next few weeks.

But to get started, I wanted to discuss how the MySQL Cluster database addresses the first …

Join us for a live webinar and download a new whitepaper where we discuss how to realize new value from data collected during web session management.

Session management has long been a key component of any web infrastructure – enhancing the user browsing experience through improved reliability, reduced latency and tighter security.

Increasingly organizations are looking to unlock more value from session management to further improve user loyalty (i.e. making the web service more “sticky”) and improve monetization of web services.  There are two distinct developments that offer the promise of unlocking more value from session data:
1.    Provide highly personalized browsing experiences by …