Ever considered developing a RESTful API? Ever wondered what is FRAPI and how it works? Well apart from reading the frameworks’s website, there was no real way to assess FRAPI as a RESTful API Framework — Not until recently.

In order to ease adoption and make it more accessible for people to evaluate FRAPI, we’ve put an Amazon AMI together. This AMI comes pre-installed with Linux Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS), NGINX as the webserver, Memcached — (And no, port 11211 isn’t opened to the public), PHP5-FPM, APC and obviously FRAPI.

If you’d like to give this public AMI a spin, just go to Amazon’s instance management section, click on “Launch Instance, go to community AMIs, and search for : “ami-0adf2f63″ . Once you found it, click on “Select” (And make sure to select Port HTTP (80) when asked about which ports to open).
(more…)

After many days of speculations all around the web about Facebook’s rewrite of PHP, today Haiping Zhao from the Facebook team has announced “HipHop for PHP”. The basic idea of HipHop for PHP is that it turns the code you write in PHP into C++ which then can be turned into machine code.

Even though there are others idea that have tried accomplishing the same goal as HipHop for PHP, I believe it is quite safe to assume that Facebook has a large enough user-base to produce code that is solid enough to run and can run well.

The announcement has been made on the Facebook blog earlier today, and tonight there is going to be the video tech talk that everybody can watch:

This evening we’re hosting a small group of developers to dive deeper into HipHop for PHP and will be streaming this tech talk live. Check back here around 7:30pm Pacific time if you’d like to watch.

A few questions come to mind even though we haven’t seen the code just yet. My main concern though is the one of buffer overflows and the security implications of turning PHP code into C++. As they say on the blog, it took nearly 18 months before having a relatively stable version and 3 developers. This is a very short lapse of time to develop a solution used by so many.

Another interest of mine related to this release is how does it compete with the likes of phc or roadsend php. If it does at all.

However I have noticed on their blog that Facebook has also developed HPHPi which seems to let you use HipHop but without having to actually compile your code before running it (The concept seems a bit like APC’s stat on and off switch from the few lines of description), which seems like a quite interesting idea for the development stages.

According to wikipedia, the Dragon’s Den is:

a venture-capitalist television programme that originated in Japan where the format is owned by Sony. The format, which now airs internationally, consists of entrepreneurs pitching their ideas in order to secure investment finance from business experts — the “Dragons”.

As some may already know, in 2009 the television show began in Ireland on RTÉ ONE. This post covers the technical considerations encountered when a web site / application appears on national television. (more…)