SlowNews: HipHop, Redis, Riak, Weave, Homebrew

HipHop Compiles PHP to C++

What do you do if you have to serve up 400 billion PHP page views a month? You don’t, because you’re not Facebook. But, for Facebook speeding things up can make a real difference on their compute costs. Their newly open sourced tool HipHop translates PHP to C++ and then compiles the result with g++. Net benefit? Apparently 50% less CPU usage. Nice!

Also, check out Paul Biggar’s take on PHP compilation and how HipHop impacts the phc project.

Mozilla Weave Hits 1.0, Adds Developer APIs

The Mozilla Weave project recently shipped 1.0 of their Firefox extension that synchronizes information (securely and privately) between your browsers. This week, the Weave team has announced Python and JavaScript client libraries and APIs in general for accessing this data. They have web-based and iPhone clients as prototypes, which is really cool. Personally, I find the identity aspects to Weave very interesting and hope to see more experimentation and implementation of identity directly in the browser (how many more username and password systems do you want to implement?)

Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla Labs.

Redis Goes Beyond RAM

Redis is a very useful disk-backed key/value store with lots of interesting atomic operations. It’s always had the limitation that the entire dataset needed to fit in memory. antirez explains how that limitation is removed in Redis 2.0. The concept of virtual memory is lifted straight from OS theory and practice, but the application-level implementation is a better fit for Redis’ needs.

Homebrew: OS X’s Missing Package Manager

Homebrew continues to be a fairly stealth project, I think. If you’re a Mac user, though, it’s worth looking at. It’s a super simple package management system that makes it easy to install many common packages and even makes it easy to manage packages that you download and build yourself. Andre Arko posted a nice introduction.

Removing Features

Lukas Mathis has written one of the best articles about removing features that I’ve seen. It’s always tempting to keep adding more, when really adding better is really what’s required.

More On The Use of h.264

The hubbub around h.264 that I talked about in the first SlowNews issue has a great new summary courtesy of Ben Schwartz. Ben took the actual license text from various pieces of software that produce h.264 videos, making it plain as day that people creating videos and posting them online are quite often in violation of the patents. Whatever people may think of Theora’s quality, at least it is unencumbered.

Mugtug Sketchpad: Fast Painting with Canvas

If you’ve doubted the growing ability of standards-based webapps to fully replace many desktop apps, Sketchpad should sway you. As long as you’re not using IE.

Detailed Riak Overview

Sean Cribbs insists that you should use Riak for your next Rails app. I’m not likely to be created a Rails app any time soon, but this was still a good overview of Riak. I’ve personally had a lot more exposure to MongoDB and Redis than Riak, so it’s nice to get a feel for what Riak’s all about. Also worth a look: Riak now supports JavaScript-based map/reduce jobs.

Rails 3 Beta Release

I don’t intend to include beta releases or vaporware here in general, but Rails 3 has been in development for a long time and is coming out from under its merger with Merb. So, in case you missed it, here’s DHH’s post about Rails 3.0’s beta.

Free F# Book

I’ve been impressed by some of the directions in which Microsoft has taken their development tools. The F# programming language, a functional language, seems like the kind of thing you wouldn’t see coming out of Microsoft (or, at least, beyond the research prototype stage). But, it’s certainly well beyond research prototype and now you can even get a feel for F# from a new, free book by John Puopolo with Sandy Squires.

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Top 11 Reasons Why There Was No List Last Week

1. Perhaps every other SlowNews issue has no list?

2. There was no list?

3. I forgot.