LAMP is a proven software stack for developing and implementing multi-tiered web applications. Linux - operating system Apache - web server MySQL - database server PHP - programming language for dynamic web pages The nice part of this stack is that it an extremely low cost solution for implementing web based solutions. This stack is also interchangeable. The operating

If you are at a party, barbecue, tail-gate or other social event the topic of middleware or middle-tier may come up. This article will teach you enough to join in or maybe more importantly to walk away.

There are a lot of different languages used to build web applications. The key point to remember is that all of them end up generating HTML code that is returned to a browser.

For the curious, the slides for the eLiberatica 2007 presentations are now up at http://eliberatica.ro/2007/ - the slides include presentations from eZ CEO Aleksander Farstad, Brian Behlendorf, FSF Europe President Georg Greve, Ubuntist Kurt von Finck and MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius (and yours truly, but the slides are a bit weak - check out my …

Here are the instructions for building mod_jk.

1. Download the source and untar it.

2. Ensure you have Sun Studio compiler in your PATH followed by /usr/ccs/bin. Save the following in 'make_solaris.sh' in the 'native' directory :

#!/bin/sh
INSTALLDIR=/opt/coolstack
APACHEDIR=$INSTALLDIR/apache2
make distclean
PATH=$INSTALLDIR/bin:$PATH
export PATH
./configure --with-apxs=/opt/coolstack/apache2/bin/apxs --with-java-home=/usr/java --with-prefix=$INSTALLDIR
make
make install

3. Go to the 'native' directory and run ./make_solaris.sh

4. Edit your httpd.conf file to include :

  LoadModule jk_module        modules/mod_jk.so

5. Restart the apache httpd server.

Let me know if this …

I've never been all that interested in solving small problems. Small problems with scaling are resolved with single indexes, upgrades to hardware, or simply creating a bigger pipe.

When the measure of the Internet was a T-1, you could flood the network with the average 486. At the time I watched people buy hardware in the hundred's of thousands, and sometimes more, which never went used. Today's hardware is overkill for a lot of applications, so the first step in scaling is often tuning the hardware that you have already purchased. Make use of what you already have.

The "Slashdot Effect" is a perfect example of what is normally a small problem. What is the Slashdot Effect? Point tens of thousands of eyeballs at a website and watch it crash. The root cause of this? Most of the time it is because the site operator had their Apache max connections set to some ridiculous number. Users would bring the site down because there …

My friends Theo Schlossnagle, Laura Thomson and Chris Shiflett are each presenting at ApacheCon Europe. They are each excellent presenters with solid content - I have seen Theo present at a previous ApacheCon, caught Laura at several OSCONs and finally saw Shiflett speak at the PHP Quebec conference earlier this year.

The deal is simple - sign up for any of their tutorials before the early bird deadline for the conference closes (on June 6th) and get complementary copies of some of the speaker’s book(s).

The sessions are:

• Advanced Production Troubleshooting …

Well the past 8 weeks of my life have had a lot of ups and downs I must say but it feels like its all finally paid off. I got to launch a new site on Friday that I'm really happy with. I got to work with some great team members and we all pulled together and created an awesome site, or at least I think so! Club SOAPnet launched on friday without a hitch. There are a couple of small things missing and should be a nice easy week of clean up. I spent a lot of time before beginning development working on the data model and looking through PEAR to see what packages will help me out. Some of the challenges were integrating with the Disney Global Registration system but that worked out in the end using curl to keep a seemless login process. It was nice not having to worry about storing sensitive data for once thanks Disney for taking that off my shoulders. I coded the whole site in about 5 weeks time …

Well the past 8 weeks of my life have had a lot of ups and downs I must say but it feels like its all finally paid off. I got to launch a new site on Friday that I'm really happy with. I got to work with some great team members and we all pulled together and created an awesome site, or at least I think so! Club SOAPnet launched on friday without a hitch. There are a couple of small things missing and should be a nice easy week of clean up. I spent a lot of time before beginning development working on the data model and looking through PEAR to see what packages will help me out. Some of the challenges were integrating with the Disney Global Registration system but that worked out in the end using curl to keep a seemless login process. It was nice not having to worry about storing sensitive data for once thanks Disney for taking that off my shoulders. I coded the whole site in about 5 weeks time …

IP Concerns are very real; I’ve had a couple of customers bring them up in the past. It boils down to trust; It doesn’t matter if you and a thriving community have written the best code in the world; without someone to vouch that all proper measures were taken, there is an increased risk associated with your project.

This is the second time I’ve heard IP as one of the motivations behind the Zend Framework.. The first time was from David, and now there’s this line from Wez.

I never used to think about clean IP. I knew that some organizations, such as the Apache Foundation, make committers sign contributor license agreements, but as I am not an ASF contributor, it wasn’t something I had to deal with.

That’s changed now that I’m …

So about a month ago we put in a new hosting infrastructure and me as the sole admin needed an easy way to monitor and keep an eye on all of my servers and the services and resources of each server.



So after some digging around I found that an application I use to use was now a new application Nagios. Now this application is great, took me about 2 days to set everything up as it is now, but once I found everything i needed it was great. Nagios uses SNMP Protocol to monitor almost anything on your server. It has a very OO configuration allowing you to reach some pretty complex setups. Mine didn't get too complex so i can't speak to all of that but it was pretty easy to setup once I got the hang of it. After I found these two Nagios Plugin pages I knew I was truely in heaven. …