At our company we have a lot of uses for a solid API. We can use it to distribute config files, have servers report in, let customers edit DNS records using their own interface, etc. Now that I'm converting all of our legacy code to a big CakePHP application, the API needed a revisit as well. I chose to use REST as a standard, read about everything related to Cake & REST, and started hacking on a reusable plugin. The idea is that you can drop it in any application and unlock existing functionality to REST with minimal changes to your code.

I still got sites running Apache, but all new projects are launched with Nginx. I don't need many of the features that Apache offers, and the speed gain of Nginx is just tremendous. Once you've experienced it, I doubt you'll want to go back.

If you want to do command-line MySQL administration like restoring databases or dumping statistics, you need the root account and it's password. Or do you?

Don't know Redis? Think Memcache, with support for for lists, and disk-based storage. You can use Redis as a database, queue, cache server or all of those combined. Let's see how you can use this power in your PHP apps.

Some time ago I was in the situation where I was looking at 200 MyISAM tables screaming to get converted to InnoDB for performance reasons. You probably know that MyISAM is better at fulltext searches and such, but what I needed was this database stop locking entire tables when I was just doing row-level interactions. Here's how I did in one go.

When you're debugging a tough problem you sometimes need to analyze the HTTP traffic flowing between your machine and a webserver or proxy. Sometimes you can use firebug or chrome inspector for that. But here's a lowlevel alternative that I'm pretty excited about. Meet Tshark.

Here the notes I took during the Dutch PHP conference 2010 (#dpc10). They're not a representative summary of the event's highlights cause I could only attend 1 of 4 talks at any given time. I also filtered out things that didn't interest me personally.

Today we are very happy to announce the commercial availability of transloadit.com.

At transloadit we use HAProxy "The Reliable, High Performance TCP/HTTP Load Balancer" so that we can offer different services on 1 port. For instance, depending on the hostname, a requests to port 80 can be routed to either nodejs for api.transloadit.com, or nginx for www.transloadit.com. HAProxy has been good to us and setting it up was a breeze. But getting HAProxy to log on Ubuntu Lucid was harder than I thought. All of the tutorials I found either didn't cover logging, or had deprecated information on it. Google suddenly stopped being my friend.