edtechre

Scheduling backups and setting up DNS is certainly easier on Rackspace.

Scary. I actually remember those TV segments from my childhood. 0_0

And I'm feeling better that I decided to go with Rackspace instead of EC2.

Yeah but something that long is best left to the meta description, not the title.

Because it's all abstracted away. B-trees are used in the underlying implementations of RDBMS. Other data stores such as MongoDB, Memcached, and Redis use hash tables.

Arrays, linked lists, and dictionaries are usually abstracted away by whatever scripting language is in use.

I can't think of common use cases for data structures like heaps/priority queues and graphs. Both come in handy for dependency management and loading assets from disk, like in the case of writing a package manager or a game. But nothing that complex is needed for your typical web app.

Does anyone have any good resources for http://www.andengine.org/ ?

Or does anyone know of another good 2D game engine for Android?

Thanks for the info. I do think the default should have been pass by reference though, like with objects since PHP5.

I could be wrong about the inefficiency, maybe arrays in PHP are implemented as "copy on write". But seeing how PHP is such a mess of a language, I somehow doubt it...

I actually agree here. CI is barely a framework. When I used it, I found myself writing a bunch of custom code to handle encapsulating view logic like widgets, decorators, etc. Plus, plenty of other code to handle form validation etc. Other frameworks provide all of this out of the box.

I dislike ZF because it tries too hard to be like Java/Struts2, and borrows a lot of Java's verbosity and bloat.

I use Yii a lot nowadays, and use phing for deployments. And for Python folks, I'd recommend web2py since it has a lot of similarities to Yii from what I've seen.

If you don't want to admin a Linux box (which really doesn't take much), you can use Python or even Java on App Engine for free, if just to test them out.

I write way more PHP than Python. But dicts are MUCH better in Python. In fact, dict keys can be any data type you choose, like a true hash table in other languages like Java (e.g. HashMap).

Not to mention a couple of other things I hate about PHP arrays:

1) They don't extend stdClass so they aren't technically objects-- they're a different data type completely (WTF?) 2) Arrays are passed by value and not reference by default. Double WTF. So passing an array to a method call without the & reference operator is inefficient and prone to bugs as noobs don't expect the immutable behavior.

Thanks for writing this.

I've been taking a "break" and am finishing up work on my own project. I got one of these emails from a Google recruiter last week.

I had applied to Google back in 2009, but chickened and canceled the interview after I read about the useless and non-trivial theoretical questions they ask.

After reading this, I think I'll still pass. But for different reasons :).

Also, this statement is rubbish:

"Unit Testing

While we don’t practice Test-Driven-Development, we do have unit tests in place. PHP does not provide an elegant test library, so we built our own (soon-to-be open-sourced.)"

Really? You've never heard of PHPUnit?

I absolutely agree, this article was a waste of time. His use of technology wasn't awe-inspiring either. He comes off as someone who is unfamiliar with PHP instead of an experienced user with a bone to pick.

I've worked in Java, PHP and Python. I personally prefer using Yii, phing along with PEAR and pecl libraries to anything else, at least with timeliness in mind.

Unlike Ruby and Python, PHP is a DSL, plain and simple. Yes, it's poorly designed. But it does what it was meant to do-- to build web apps-- quite well. It's up to the end user to write software that scales. And a lot of the scaling issues you'll see will be independent of language choice.