February

February 21, 2010

The CAP theorem is like physics to airplanes: every database must design around it

Back in 2000, Eric Brewer introduced the CAP theorem, an explanation of inherent tradeoffs in distributed database design. In short: you can’t have it all. (Okay, so there’s some debate about that, but alternative theories generally introduce other caveats.)

February 16, 2010

Feast your eyes (and votes) on our web chefs' tasty DrupalCon San Francisco session proposals

Vote!

We are still 62 days away from DrupalCon San Francisco 2010, but in order to get truly excited about the event, you’ll want to start thinking about the amazing sessions you’ll attend. Beginning today, attendees are allowed to vote on those sessions they most want to see on the final schedule in April.

This year, Four Kitchens is both sponsoring DrupalCon San Francisco and offering to share our experience and knowledge with the community. If you’d like to see any of the sessions listed below, please vote! (And tell your co-workers, friends, and pets* to vote, too.)

February 2, 2010

Making Drupal and Pressflow more mundane

Drupal and Pressflow have too much magic in them, and not the good kind. On the recent Facebook webcast introducing HipHop PHP, their PHP-to-C++ converter, they broke down PHP language features into two categories: magic and mundane. The distinction is how well each capability of PHP, a dynamic language, translates to a static language like C++. “Mundane” features translate well to C++ and get a big performance boost in HipHop PHP. “Magic” features are either unsupported, like eval(), or run about as fast as today’s PHP+APC, like call_user_func_array().