Frameworks are everywhere these days. You can hardly find a site that does not use one or more to get the job done. Join the CWSA as we welcome Chris Miller, Co-Founder and Lead Developer of Podiobooks.com and Senior Developer, American Greetings Interactive as he takes us on a journey meant to answer such questions as: What is a framework? Why would I use one? What are the pros and cons of using a framework? What are the most prevelent frameworks in use today, and where can I find them?

As a prelude to the talk, I’d like to ask those of you using a software framework: do you have a favorite or favorites?  Why do you like it? What do you find lacking? Are there frameworks that you wouldn’t touch? Why? What pros and cons to you find working with frameworks vs. rolling your own?

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From the docs:

Attached is a simple import, export, and backup utility. Mahalo.com has been using this in production for several months to back up our HBase clusters as well as to migrate data from production to development clusters, etc. Simple MapReduce job for exporting data from an HBase table. The exported data is in a simple, flat format that can then be imported using another MapReduce job. This gives you both a backup capability, and a simple way to import and export data from tables. The output of a backup job is a flat text file, or series of flat text files. Each row is represented by a single line, with each item tab delimited. Column names are plain text, while column values are base 64 encoded. This helps us deal with tabs and line breaks in the data. Generally you should not have to worry about this at all.

HBase Backup/Export/Import Tool

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At Mahalo, we’ve been using Hadoop more and more often. We use HBase to store the text and revisions of our pages, and we are building an in-house cluster to handle some of the large data operations we have to deal with from time to time.

It’s an interesting technology, and I know we’re not alone in adopting Hadoop as one of the tools in our toolbox. When I looked around to find a local group dealing specifically with Hadoop, I came up empty. The logical thing to do was to start a group.

If you’re interested and want to know more, please either visit the Meetup page, or leave a comment for me and I’ll email you directly.

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1. Hadoop is a software platform that lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data. I’ll be writing about this more in the future, both here and on Unspecified Error.

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photo credit: doyoukekko

In the past few weeks, I’ve helped some of my friends move their WordPress blogs to new servers. One of them had a consistent problem with their host because WordPress was hogging cycles on the shared server. We implemented the WP-Cache plugin, and things got better in minutes.

Jeff Atwood has written a terrific article about the perils of using WordPress without caching.

I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the community around WordPress, and the software itself is remarkably polished. That’s not to say that I haven’t run into a few egregious bugs in the 2.5 release, but on the whole, the experience has been good bordering on pleasant.

Or at least it was, until I noticed how much CPU time the PHP FastCGI process was using for modest little old blog.stackoverflow.com.

Read the full article if you have WordPress blog — even if you’re not technically inclined. You’ll thank yourself later.

Caching is the smart way to handle any generated content. When you cache your content, a plugin or service will take the HTML generated by your blog and save it to a flat file. It’s just like taking a snapshot. The cached file will expire after a time, so that your content will remain fresh. It takes many less CPU cycles to serve flat file than to generate them from the database every time. This has the added benefit of speeding up your blog’s display time as well.

Consider your RSS feeds. While RSS is a great thing, every time someone hits your feed you are generating content from the database and serving it out to the world. Poorly behaved RSS readers will this your feed as often as every five minutes. For a worst case scenario, take the file size of your feed when generated, multiply it by the number of subscribers you have, and multiply that by 12. That’s how much bandwidth you could be using per hour for the feed alone. If you have a great number of items in your feed or are very popular you’ll eventually get a shutdown notice from your host or the site will simply shut down on it’s own, displaying a lovely error message to your audience.

To avoid downtime, use WP-Cache or WP-SuperCache to implement a quick caching solution. For an additional layer of protection, try using Feedburner for your feeds. It caches your feed for 30 minutes on their server, so you reduce the load on your server considerably. You’ll see your blog begin to behave, and you’ll get those creepy hosting admins off your case.

Advanced Users: For those of you who have full control of your servers, look at using memcached to handle the caching for the server. Less wear and tear on the disk, performs better for larger-scale projects than simple file caching. Check out Ryan’s post on how to implement WordPress with memcached.

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