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PHP set to further penetrate Enterprise solutions arena

What is Enterprise Application?
Enterprise Applications are software which provides business logic support functionality for an enterprise, typically in commercial organizations, which aims to improve the enterprise’s productivity and efficiency.

Characteristics of enterprise software:
Characteristics of enterprise software are performance, scalability, and robustness. Enterprise software typically has interfaces to other enterprise software.

Services provided by enterprise software are typically business-oriented tools such as online shopping and online payment processing, interactive product catalogue, automated billing systems, security, content management, CRM, ERP, Business Intelligence, HR Management, Manufacturing, EAI etc.

What is Scalability?
There are a number of different aspects of scalability. It always starts with performance, code maintainability, fault tolerance, and the availability of programming staff.

Why people has negative impression that PHP is only for small scale web-sites?
PHP is a language for the rapid development of dynamic Websites. It also has many features that are friendly to beginning programmers, such as the fact that it doesn’t require variable declarations. However, many of these features can lead a programmer inadvertently to allow security holes to creep into a Web application. The popular security mailing lists teem with notes of flaws identified in PHP applications, but PHP can be as secure as any other language once you understand the basic types of flaws PHP applications tend to exhibit.

PHP is an open source programming language that is widely popular on the web. However because PHP so popular in shared hosting environments, many people have an impression that PHP is only for small scale web-sites. This is patently untrue, and PHP is in use in many large scale web sites such as Yahoo, wikipedia and Lufthansa Online Ticketing for the creation of large web applications such as IMP.

Enterprises want to have specific assurances about a web technology they use in the following areas:

  • performance and fast development
  • reliability and security
  • extensibility – able to use industry standards to communicate with other software systems.
  • scalability – able to add additional servers as the load increases.
  • load balancing – ability to distribute the load so no single server is overloaded
  • high availability – ability to survive failure of server components transparently.

Conclusion:
To achieve high performance and scalability – it not only depend on language, it also depend on the developers.

Cited from Why not PHP for enterprise applications?

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Problems integrating SWFupload with Joomla

I am currently working on integrating the SWFUpload library with Joomla 1.5. All seems to be working well except till the portion whereby the file is uploaded.

I get the response by the system to do a login and this response is returned to me via uploadSuccess(file, serverData) method in the SWFupload handlers.js file. The session is not maintained apparently when I do the post.

I am currently referencing http://docs.joomla.org/Creating_a_file_uploader_in_your_component for possible resolutions to this bug.

Now I am heading off to work as the Dancing Christmas tree. Hopefully I would solve it when I get back in the evening.

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Extending Joomla to use Jquery

Recently there seems to be a lot of libraries that are being created using Jquery.

Joomla has been traditionally used with the  mootools library. Instead of using this library, I have opted to instead use the Jquery library.

I created a component for myself and  loaded the jQuery library into one of the sub folders of this Joomla component. I further instructed Joomla to load the javascript file.

Keeping my fingers crossed I wrote this syntex in the template file

<script>

jQuery(document).ready(function(){alert(‘hello world’)});

</script>

And Eureka!! It worked. Now I will go on further extending Joomla to create a very user friendly component for my clients which have been facing lots of problems with the counter-intuitive Joomla Administration interface.

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Converting of Windows Word Document to PDF

This is necessary mainly for business documents where you only want to allow the other part read only ability, and don’t want the other party to be editing any contents of the document.

I was trying the PDFCreator printing client for a while. However this client seems to fail when dealing with much larger clients.

Thereafter I switched to using PDFOnline.com service. This service is not very stable. If you are using the new version, it crashes all the time. However you will still need to go through the new version experience the crash before you could get to the old version.

I tried primopdf.com after that. The result was horrendous. The site’s engine did not take into account the possiblity of versioning within the winword document. I ended up having the original unedited version of the document.

I have tried http://www.freepdfconvert.com/ it is working fine so far. The only exception experienced was an inexplicable note attached to one particular page of the document. Perhaps I should raise this issue to the service provider and have them improve their service to make it even better.

Then again imposing systems on reality, is like catching water with a net, exceptions will always bound to occur.

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Email client configuration POP vs IMAP

The other day I provided Mel from Winter in Venice instructions on how to configure their mail client. Their mail server was on google. Their mail client were configured using POP.

Apparently most of them are attempting to check their emails from multiple places, sometimes from their computer in their office, sometimes from their computer at home, sometimes from their black berry hand phone. One requirement which I was not priorly informed of.

Just now, right after I finished my event with Ivy and I received an “urgent” call from her. Seems like alot of people are coming to me with “urgent” issues recently, most of the time small escalations actually. Having listened to her problem, I decided to head home and do some research over the internet.

As a result of my research I chanced upon this article on the protocol IMAP and the protocol POP.

Apparently if you are using POP, after you have read the mail once from the mail server, the next time you attempt and reading from the mail server from another client, this current mail no longer gets downloaded.

IMAP does exactly the opposite. Even if you have downloaded and read a mail from the server, the next time you attempt to use a different mail client to retrieve mails from your mail server, the same mail will get downloaded again.

Thus that explains the differences which I understand between IMAP and POP thus far.

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Making Firefox perform faster

Recently my firefox application started to slow down when I type URL of a particular web site into the locations most especially when I typed an incorred URL.

I got really annoyed with it and hence decided to find out once and for all what the hell is happening. I used to love using Firefox before until recently.

Hence I chanced upon this site.

Following the instructions, I clicked on Tools > Options > Privacy.

I landed up on this particular page where I set Firefox to suggest Nothings when I am using the locations bar. Thereafter I applied the changes.

Immediately, I suddenly liked using FireFox again.

Next thing next to consider is how to reduce the loading time. That remains a question to be solved.