João Prado Maia’s Weblog

Some interesting projects / products I learned while attending the MySQL Conference 2008:

• PDO_MYSQLND – A new PDO extension that is compatible with PDO_MySQL, but uses the mysqlnd library to deal with the database server.
• DbUnit – an extension to standard PHPUnit to deal with database-related unit tests.
• Buildbot – cool little utility that lets you automate a lot of tasks to achieve continuous integration of software projects. I need to play with this and see if it would work for some of our unit tests.
• Varnish – a new high-performance reverse proxy, kind of like Squid, but made for this type of work.

Took me a while to publish this draft :(

This is a really cool project that I found out through Jonathan Boutelle’s presentation at SXSW’08 called AJAX and Flash mistakes. That’s basically what they use on Slideshare to upload documents to their system.

It seems pretty useful, and I’m already thinking about using it in a few projects in the future. You can find more details about it on the homepage.

My only concern is that in some scenarios you may want to avoid a hard dependency on Flash, but for consumer sites it seems like a safe choice.

I found out about Drip through John Resig’s Secrets of JavaScript Libraries panel at SXSW this year. Unfortunately I couldn’t attend his panel, but the presentation document seems like a good read.

Anyway, Drip is a memory leak detector application for Internet Explorer. It basically runs IE within the application itself, and analyzes the memory usage for any leaks. Seems really really useful, and just by playing with it for a few minutes I already found a couple of pieces of code to fix.

Ilia Alshanetsky gave a very interesting presentation at PHP Quebec on the new features planned for PHP 5.3.

Looks like we will finally get namespace support in PHP.

• Interesting way of using Apache to send large files to the client by using mod_xsendfile.
• Microsoft is still using an internal IE-HTML DOM that is not XHTML-compliant, even in XHTML documents.
• Dion Almaer wrote a simple video player that skips to specific portions of a YouTube video, using the newly released set of APIs. Lots of interesting ways to integrate with their content.