Tag Archives: architecture

06 Mar
2014

Working with PHP and Beanstalkd

I have just introduced Beanstalkd into my current PHP project; it was super-easy so I thought I’d share some examples and my thoughts on how a job queue fits in with a PHP web application.

The Scenario

I have an API backend and a web frontend on this project (there may be apps later. It’s a startup, there could be anything later). Both front and back ends are PHP Slim Framework applications, and there’s a sort of JSON-RPC going on in between the two.

The job queue will handle a few things we don’t want to do in real time on the application, such as:

  • updating counts of things like comments; when a comment is made, a job gets created and we can return to the user. At some point the job will get processed updating the counts of how many comments are on that thing, how many comments the user made, adding to a news feed of activities … you get the idea. Continue reading →
13 Jun
2013

Are Subqueries RESTful?

Twitter is great for one-liners, but it’s very difficult to carry on any kind of advanced conversation there. Therefore when I saw this tweet yesterday, I knew I’d be picking a different medium to reply:

The blog seems like a good place, as I can put examples and all kinds other things here, and waffle at length (which is really why I like it!). Because when condensed to tweet form, the answer is really “it depends”.

The Problem(s)

REST is all about representations of resources. They might come in different formats, and they might appear at their own URI as well as in one or more collections, but essentially you just get a representation of a thing. This is great, apart from when it isn’t.

  • What if you want a smaller result set with only a limited number of fields?
  • What if you want related data? For every resource in a collection?

Continue reading →