I have the honor today of writing a guest blog post on Igor Wiedler’s Blog about Compilers. If you don’t know @igorwhiletrue, he’s pretty much the craziest developer that I know. And crazy in that genious sort of way. He’s been doing a series of blog posts about Stack Machines and building complex runtimes from simple components. Well, today I authored a guest post on compiling code to run on said runtime. The compiler only took about 100 lines of code!!!
If you’ve been following the news, you’ll have noticed that yesterday Composer got a bit of a speed boost. And by “bit of a speed boost”, we’re talking between 50% and 90% reduction in runtime depending on the complexity of the dependencies. But how did the fix work? And should you make the same sort of change to your projects? For those of you who want the TL/DR answer: the answer is no you shouldn’t.
Last week I published a post called Alternatives To MVC. In it, I described some alternatives to MVC and why they all suck as application architectures (or more specifically, are not application architectures). I left a pretty big teaser at the end towards a next post. Well, I’m still working on it. It’s a lot bigger job than I realized. But I did want to make a comment on a comment that was left on the last post.
An interesting pull request has been opened against PHP to make bin2hex() constant time. This has lead to some interesting discussion on the mailing list (which even got me to reply :-X). There has been pretty good coverage over remote timing attacks in PHP, but they talk about string comparison. I’d like to talk about other types of timing attacks.
Last week, I wrote A Beginner’s Guide To MVC For The Web. In it, I described some of the problems with both the MVC pattern and the conceptual “MVC” that frameworks use. But what I didn’t do is describe better ways. I didn’t describe any of the alternatives. So let’s do that. Let’s talk about some of the alternatives to MVC…
There are a bunch of guides out there that claim to be a guide to MVC. It’s almost like writing your own framework in that it’s “one of those things” that everyone does. I realized that I never wrote my “beginners guide to MVC”. So I’ve decided to do exactly that. Here’s my “beginners guide to MVC for the web”:
Recently, a severe SQL Injection vulnerability was found in Drupal 7. It was fixed immediately (and correctly), but there was a problem. Attackers made automated scripts to attack unpatched sites. Within hours of the release of the vulnerability fix, sites were being compromised. And when I say compromised, I’m talking remote code execution, backdoors, the lot. Why? Like any attack, it’s a chain of issues, that independently aren’t as bad, but add up to bad news. Let’s talk about them: What went wrong? What went right? And what could have happened better? There’s a lesson that every developer needs to learn in here.
It’s quite easy to mix up terminology and talk about making “easy” systems and “simple” ones. But in reality, they are completely different measures, and how we design and architect systems will depend strongly on our goals. By differentiating Simple from Easy, Complex from Hard, we can start to talk about the tradeoffs that designs can give us. And we can then start making better designs.
To some of you, this may not be new. But to many of the people preaching “Agile Software Development”, Agile is not what you think it is. Let me say that again, because it’s important: You’re Doing Agile Wrong.
There has been a lot of talk about typing in PHP lately. There are a couple of popular proposals for how to clean up PHP’s APIs to be simpler. Most of them involve changing PHP’s type system at a very fundamental level. So I thought it would be a good idea to talk about that. What goes into a type?