Development, Analysis And Research

With the recent release of PHP 5.1.0 RC1, I have noticed a release of Zends Session Clustering that their marketing team had mentioned was due for a release (I assume this to have been delayed). Whilst I have been using standard file based session’s for an on going project, I hit an unusual stumbling block with a very expensive operation to create sessions in a clustered enviroment. Unfortunately I never did find the cause as to why session start caused such overhead, however this was ironed out. It will be interesting to see how Zends Session Clustering would work inline with this project.

Reading through some documentation i’m a little apprehensive as to Zends solution for Session Clustering.

In this module sessions “reside” on the server where they were first created. These sessions are subsequently delivered to other servers in the cluster, by having the alternate server request the session data from the original server. This means a fully distributed solution - delivering high performance, linearly scalable solution utilize existing hardware investment, while ensuring the ability to continue growing.

Zends Session Clustering utilizes a daemon to allow clustering of sessions, currently our in our enviroment sessions are persisted to one dedicated server, the master.

Zend Session Cluster

PHP, Zend, Zends Session Clustering

Popularity: 2% [?]

After reviewing MultiMap, I decided to demo StreetMap and in conclusion they both have fantastically appalling interfaces. Whilst MultiMap’s implementation appears to be more flexible allowing information to flexible, these interfaces demonstrate the extreme basics of their services. The only information required to implement a store location facility is a PostCode, Longitude and Latitude and the only information worth while is currently the information I found from the royal mail for PAF data. The only value I have found in these services are the use of the mapping functionality and is the only reason I am using there trialing there services.

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Popularity: 12% [?]

I recently started playing with a couple trial accounts from multi-map for a client of ours. I was quite surprised it is actually running Coldfusion and MySQL. Whilst I have heard of MySQL supporting GIS and Spatial data, I have never seen an implementation or known of one until now.

Whilst playing with Multimap I found a couple bugs within 5 minutes, the first being a problem with some calculations on tabular data types with CF complaining about LEFT(MID etc…
The other was a rather poor implementation of their user interface. I generally do things backwards and as a result rather than clicking through step 1 - ~6 I started at 6. This resulted in CF having trouble with creating a table in MySQL and obviously thowing an error. From what I can gather it is a very simple implementation, of which lat and lon coordinates are populated from their data.

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Data
Bug One (MySQL Table Creation)
As you can tell this is a really poor interface, apparently they were reviewing the current interface according to one of their technical guys… If you skip a step you will most likely thow an cold fusion error:(

Table
Bug Two (CF Error)

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I implemented my own version, however the data I acquired was inaccurate and varied within roughly 1-2 miles as well as being a very limited on the amount of information it contained. I also received the sample RAW PAF (Postcode Address File) data from the Royal Mail, and having a look through seems very detailed, although not quite what I was looking for…

Popularity: 2% [?]