If you have ever worked on a massively high trafficked website, you know that cache is very important to keeping the server count down and being a superhero to your database servers. Cache can be bad and overly optimized but when you hit a certain threshold, relational databases, databases that are dimension modelled for data warehouse, and even server resources get exhausted. At that point you have two options, buy more servers, or more likely, cache read data.

Each platform has their own way to do this, but there is a common baseplane way to do caching, yes even in .NET. That is with memcached. Memcached is a very common and useful tool that makes caching data and cache layers in an application something that can be the same on every platform. The benefit of using memcached is it is open, common and it has APIs for nearly every popular web development platform (and can be wired in easily to platforms that don’t have their own cache mechanism). Why write your caching layer specific to a certain platform when you can memcache?

If you write high performance web apps and don’t memcache, I feel bad for your server budget and your late nights when that ad buy hits or something popular on your site becomes all the rave.

Perl API

An object-oriented Perl module can be found on CPAN as Cache::Memcached or in Subversion (ChangeLog). (GPL/Artistic)

The Perl API takes advantage of the server’s opaque flag support and sets its “complex” flag whenever the object being stored or retrieved isn’t a plain scalar. In that case, the Storable module is used to freeze and thaw the value automatically going in and out of the memcached.

There is also Cache::Memcached::Fast—another Perl client written in C, largely compatible with the original Cache::Memcached. Available on CPAN at http://search.cpan.org/dist/Cache-Memcached-Fast/.

PHP API

There are tons of PHP libraries available, in different conditions. But it now seems there’s an official one:

• PHP PECL memcached client — official PHP client

Python API

The Python client we’d previously released was just a prototype, and we don’t have regular Python programmers on hand. The folks at Tummy.com have took over maintenance. See ftp://ftp.tummy.com/pub/python-memcached/ for the latest versions.

Ruby API

• http://www.deveiate.org/code/Ruby-MemCache.html
• gem install memcache-client
• http://blog.evanweaver.com/files/doc/fauna/memcached/. C backed client wrapping libmemcached.

Java API

A Java API is maintained by Greg Whalin from Meetup.com. You can find that library here:

• http://www.whalin.com/memcached/ — Java API for memcached

An improved Java API maintained by Dustin Sallings is also available. Aggressively optimised, ability to run async, supports binary protocol, etc. See site for details:

• http://bleu.west.spy.net/~dustin/projects/memcached/ — Improved Java API for memcached

C# API

There are multiple C# APIs:

• https://sourceforge.net/projects/memcacheddotnet/
• http://www.codeplex.com/EnyimMemcached/ – Client developed in .NET 2.0 keeping performance and extensibility in mind. (Supports consistent hashing.)
• http://code.google.com/p/beitmemcached/ – Client developed by BeIT with many new features.

C API

Multiple C libraries for memcached exist:

• apr_memcache by Paul Querna; Apache Software License version 2.0
• libmemcached by Brian Aker; BSD license. This is a new library, under heavy development.
• libmemcache by Sean Chittenden; BSD license. This is the original C library. It is no longer under active development. You should try libmemcached instead.

Postgres API

The pgmemcache project allows you to access memcache servers from Postgresql Stored Procedures and Triggers. More details and downloads are available at:

• http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgmemcache/

Chicken Scheme

• http://chicken.wiki.br/memcached — Chicken Scheme library

Lua

• http://luamemcached.luaforge.net/ — Lua library

MySQL API

The memcache_engine allows memcache to work as a storage engine to MySQL. This means that you can SELECT/UPDATE/INSERTE/DELETE from it as though it is a table in MySQL.

• memcache_engine

A set of MySQL UDFs (user defined functions) to work with memcached using libmemcached.

• MySQL UDFs for memcached

Protocol

To write a new client, check out the protocol docs. Be aware that the most important part of the client is the hashing across multiple servers, based on the key, or an optional caller-provided hashing value. Feel free to join the mailing list (or mail me directly) for help, inclusion in Subversion, and/or a link to your client from this site.

The best part, they support all good platforms and even Lua, and wisely they left out VB.NET, no worries, VB.NET’ers will never know. Only kidding…

Finally, memcached is distributed, most cache layers included with platforms listed above are in process and per machine.  If you are running your code on a webfarm memcached is the only way to go.

MVC is all the rave these days with excellent toolkits for all languages that help to define good structure for long term projects and maintenance. From Django (Python), to Rails (Ruby), Spring (Java), Maverick or Microsoft MVC (.NET/C#/Mono) and last but not least PHP MVC Frameworks.

PHP gets alot of heat mainly because it is critical mass and when that happens mediocrity comes in but since PHP5, PHP has really grown to be a great web development toolkit with many frameworks to choose from. But which one do you choose for your development? Do you want an MVC, or do you want to piece together an MVC from a template library, model framework and custom controller?

Well if you want to pick an MVC there are some great ones.

There is a site that has a decent ranking that is similar to my own likings in PHP frameworks that lists them like this:

I have not used QPHP, Zoop, Prado or PHPDevShell but plan on doing reviews of all of them. I have a simple application that i will be building in the latest versions of each platform to help show highlights, pros, cons and the ins and outs of each.

Why? And why PHP? I have long been a developer of web sites and applications. Until around 2005 PHP was not accepted in enterprisey, but this is changing. Usually .NET, Java, Perl, Python and recently Ruby were the dictated choice of the clients or environments to code in. But with PHP5 now stable and PHP4 being retired, PHP is a insurgent platform that muscled its way into the web development world in a grassroots effort, from the bottom up. That takes work and the platform deserves a second look from people that have written it off.

PHP runs many large sites from Facebook, to Digg, to Yahoo and many other platforms even Microsoft is trying to buy. PHP might even be responsible for MySQLs meteoric rise to just recently being purchased by Sun. It is a platform that is being used to build platforms. It works on any platform, it is low-bar entry and high bar scalability and architecture if using a great framework or architecture (if custom or using an existing framework).

I am an engineer, developer, architect and interactive/game developer, I use the tools for the job no matter what is chosen. Any good developer can make a system work even with bad technology but today there isn’t alot of that going around. So many great platforms, languages and frameworks, why limit to a certain OS or platform. Open your horizons and stop specializing yourself out of special skills. Choose a tool that works on just about anything on the server side and doesn’t take over servers and take 3 times as long to develop. Try some PHP5 MVC frameworks today.

Well Mono has finally reached 2.0. This is great news!  .NET skills now can span *nix, OSX, and Windows platforms.  But is your app or assembly capable of running on Mono?  Find out with MoMa.

Of course this is just a heuristic check and only finds out if your application on the surface has issues with running on a mono platform such as calls to p/invoke to windows apis or unsafe code that uses native calls but it is a great place to start.

The Mono Migration Analyzer (MoMA) tool helps you identify issues you may have when porting your .Net application to Mono. It helps pinpoint platform specific calls (P/Invoke) and areas that are not yet supported by the Mono project.

While MoMA can help show potential issues, there are many complex factors that cannot be covered by a simple tool. MoMA may fail to point out areas that will cause problems, and may point out areas which will not actually be an issue.

Use the results provided as a guide to get you started on porting your application, but remember the true test is actually running your application on Mono.

For a description of the errors that MoMA detects and how to deal with them, see MoMA – Issue Descriptions.

I have recently been really interested in making platforms and applications that aren’t limited by the OS they are contained in.  Thus mono is a very interesting platform now that it supports 2.0 fully and all the generic goodness to limit boxing/unboxing, common code between .net 2.0 apps (which are pretty much mainstream now) and developing for more of a standard that ensures your apps are portable.

Granted .NET 3.0 and 3.5 (pretty much the same version really with the addition of new frameworks such as WCF, LINQ which is very cool and functional as well as Silverlight) but most places deployed code is still .NET 2.0 and the poor souls working on very constricting .NET 1.0 and 1.1.

Also, recently Moonlight the Mono version of Silverlight has been released for alpha.