OSDC.tw - Building a platform from open source

Building a platform from open source

SYMFONY-PROJECT.COM | DEVELOPER.YAHOO.COM

Overview Why symfony? symfony vs. ysymfony Social Search: Delicious and Answers International: ShopGenie.co.uk, FoxyTunes, Digu Yahoo! Open Strategy Developer Tools YUI, Design Patterns, Tutorials Data & Social APIs YQL: Yahoo! Query Language

Who am I? Working with symfony since open source symfony Core Team Member Responsible for the development and support of ysymfony at Yahoo! Y! Answers, Delicious, Y! Widgets, Y! Application Platform Developer advocacy for Yahoo! Developer Network Contact dustin@yahoo-inc.com @dustinwhittle

EXAMPLES | TUTORIALS | CODE SAMPLES DEVELOPER.YAHOO.COM

W3C | MICROFORMATS | OAUTH | OPENID | OPENSOCIAL YAHOO! EMBRACES OPEN STANDARDS

YUI | BROWSER PLUS | DESIGN PATTERNS | R3 | YSLOW + PERFORMANCE RULES YAHOO! GIVES BACK TO OPEN SOURCE

Conferences | Hack Days | HackU | Tech Talks | YDN Theater YAHOO! ENGAGES COMMUNITIES WITH OPEN HACK EVENTS AROUND THE WORLD

Users Load Balancers Frontend Apache PHP ysymfony / YUI Custom Modules APC, PEAR, PECL, Custom Extensions Backend MySQL/Memcache YQL / Web Services Ad API User API Linux

Why a frontend platform? Rasmus says “frameworks are not well suited for Yahoo!” Build applications to requirements Do exactly what you need: no more, no less Understand that frameworks add a lot of overhead Choosing functional components is a better t Despite choosing open source or building your own Everyone uses a framework If you use open source, use only the pieces you need

Yahoo! needs from a frontend platform Fit existing environment (RHEL/PHP5/Apache) Development Cycle – How easy to develop, test, and deploy? Clean separation between data, logic, and display (MVC) Independent model layer to t service oriented architecture Extensible and pluggable Internationalization and localization support Detailed documentation and active community of support Open source and ability to contribute back

Why a framework at all? Another software layer (ysymfony, yphp, yapache) Factors out common patterns Code Layout Conguration URL Routing Authentication / Security Form Validation / Repopulation Internationalization / Localization Encourages good design Abstraction > Consistency > Maintainability

The choice to adopt symfony? Philosophy Full-stack framework for building complex web applications Adopt best ideas from anywhere, using existing code if available (Mojavi, Prado, Rails, Django) Design Clean separation between Model, View, and Controller Controller using modules and actions Views using templates in straight PHP with helpers Easy to reuse view modules to compose a page Layouts, Components, Partials, Slots

The choice to use symfony Congurability / Flexibility Features we do not want are easily disabled Use of factories for easy customization Documentation / Support Community The Denitive Guide to symfony Askeet, Jobeet, Cookbooks, Advents Active community with wiki, mailing lists, forums, irc channel

Why ysymfony for Yahoo! teams? Eliminate common patterns by adding a layer on PHP Code layout/structure (MVC) Conguration Internationalization ysymfony is just a toolkit Learn one set of tools Shift between multiple projects Consistency Long term maintainability through platform

How Yahoo! uses symfony Full Stack Yahoo! Bookmarks Yahoo! Answers Delicious Yahoo! Widgets Yahoo! Application Platform ShopGenie.co.uk, Foxytunes, Digu Internal Dashboards + Reporting Tools Components Dependency Injection Forms Caching (APC/Memcache) Routing

A look at Yahoo! Answers http://answers.yahoo.com Yahoo! Answers is the largest collection of human knowledge on the Web with more than 135 million users and 515 million answers worldwide (Yahoo! Internal Data, March 2008). Yahoo! Answers is the 2nd ranked education & reference site on the web (comScore) Available in 26 markets and 12 languages

Yahoo! Answers at the beginning Started as a small development team on PHP4 from a fork of Yahoo! Taiwan Knowledge+ Launched December 2005 by December 2006 there were 60 million users and 65 million answers The code base eventually became difcult to maintain and iterate new features Large distributed development teams (US / UK)

The big picture A complete platform for building web applications from frameworks PHP Framework JavaScript Framework CSS Framework UI Design Patterns + Best Practices Development Tools (logger, proler, debugger, docs) Unit + Functional Testing Frameworks (LIME / YUI Test) Deployment Tools (rsync deployment system)

What does Yahoo! change? Minor changes to t our environment Most changes are easily implemented via factories/plugins Dropped the ORM and pushed down the stack (SOA) Added a parallel API Dispatcher (ysfAPIClientPlugin) Added dimensions to congurations (ysfDimensionsPlugin) Integrated R3 translation/template management (ysfR3Plugin) R3 - http://developer.yahoo.com/r3/ Created a build and deployment solution (ysfBuildPlugin) Uses internal tools for packaging/deployment Integrate support for Y! User Interface libraries (ysfYUIPlugin)

Propel or Doctrine or ??? No ORM for large projects Doctrine for medium sized projects Service Oriented Architecture Platforms/Backends as services (reusable to all) Thin Controller/Fat Model (where model == services) Use PHP as the frontend glue No heavy lifting in PHP = Push down the stack Java/C++/Erlang + JSON/XML

Localizing with dimensions Cascading Conguration based on YAML Framework -> Project -> Application -> Module Extending the cascade to be based on dimensions Dimensions can be anything (and can be chained together) Data Center + Environment for customizing congurations Culture for localizing user interface + data Theme for customizing look and feel User info (is user on corporate intranet?) Caching

A build and deployment system Aggregate and minify stylesheets and javascripts Rewrite templates, css, js for CDN (Akamai, S3, …) Generate translations for congurations + templates Generate conguration cache Aggregate core classes + remove debug statements Run lint, unit, functional tests Package applications as .tgz Deployment via packages Integrated with Yahoo! internal tools

Debug Toolbars

Hello World Performance Hello world benchmarks are generally not useful You don’t use a framework to write hello world die(‘hello world’); Performance is relative to the features you use ORM I18N Output Escaping Forms/Validation Ability to scale != performance

What does it mean to scale? A system whose performance improves after adding hardware, proportionally to the capacity added, is said to be a scalable system. High Availability + Scalability + Performance Bigger dataset, more trafc, maintainable Not about performance PHP is slow, but it is very rarely your bottleneck Languages do not scale, architectures do Planning to grow and planning to fail Capacity Planning Business Continuity Planning

Scaling – The basics in PHP PHP is rarely the bottleneck (even though it can be slow) “Most performance comes not from the language, but from application design” – Rasmus Share Nothing Architecture Independent, self-sufcient, no single point of contention No local storage = No PHP Sessions Use a database (works for distributed) Use a small signed cookie (ideal) Important data in database Individual expiration on session objects Small data items Use a distributed cache Memcache Forget about small efciencies Premature optimization is the root of all evil. “ vs. ‘, echo vs. print

Scaling Databases – The basics Drop the ORM It’s a choice of convenience over performance Master/Slave Replication First steps Helps with reads, writes are still bottleneck Partitioning Segmenting data Sharding (horizontal partitioning) Segmenting data onto different physical machines Make problems smaller, easier to grow

Improving latency with Caching Always use PHP opcode cache (APC, Xcache, etc) Use for routing and i18n cache Memcache (distributed cache) Use for view cache Distributed invalidation can be a pain sfViewCacheManager makes this easy! Be intelligent about cache_keys (uri, user, state) There is a ne line to caching At what point do you spend more time managing the cache, than reading from it?

Tweaking Performance Do not use .htaccess (move to real apache cong) Set a minimal include path Increase realpath_cache_size + realpath_cache_ttl Use apc.stat=0 Don’t use features you do not need Disable in settings.yml / factories.yml Use core_compile to aggregate classes to reduce le i/o Remove debug statements + optimize le lookups sfOptimizerPlugin / project:optimize Use @routeName and use caching for factories

Symfony (v2) Symfony 2 is a set of cohesive yet decoupled components This makes it much easier to use single component to solve a single problem Which makes it easier to build micro frameworks that solve very specic problems Yahoo! Teams generally prefer solutions that are specic to their exact problem Selling the full stack can be difcult when a team only wants a few components Symfony 2 is the right direction, even if it breaks backwards compatability symfony-reloaded.org

Do it yourself for cheap Open source software = Free Apache PHP MySQL Memcache / Perlbal / MogileFS / Squid / Gearman symfony / Doctrine / Propel / Swift Nagios / Cacti Amazon Shared Infrastructure = Cheap EC2 Cloud S3 Storage + Cloudfront SimpleDB

What is Yahoo! Developer Network? The Yahoo! Developer Network offers open source tools and open data APIs to make it easy for developers to build applications and mashups. 50+ APIs / Web Services Developer Dashboard to create/manage Oauth applications Tutorials + Code Samples on using our apis Complete API Documentation Yahoo! User Interface libraries ASTRA Flash Components Design Patterns Library Evangelism: Conferences / Theater / Blogs / Events

Y! Developer Network – YUI Javascript JavaScript Framework Utilities - YAHOO, Dom, Event, Animation, Browser History Manager, Connection Manager, Cookie, DataSource, Drag and Drop, Element, Get, ImageLoader, JSON, Resize, Selector, Loader Controls / Widgets - AutoComplete, Button, Calendar, Charts, Color Picker, DataTable, ImageCropper, Rich Text Editor, Slider, Uploader Container (Module, Overlay, Panel, Tooltip, Dialog), Layout Manager, Menu, TabView, TreeView Debug – Logger, Proler, Test

Y! Developer Network – YUI CSS CSS Foundation Reset - Neutralizes browser CSS styles Base - Applies consistent style foundation Fonts - Foundation for typography and font-sizing Grids - Thousands of wireframe layouts User Interface Design Patterns Library Proven solutions to common interfaces http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/ Grade Browser Support / Progressive Enhancement

Y! Developer Network – Documentation More than 275 functional examples http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/ YSlow + Performance Rules http://developer.yahoo.com/performance YUI Blog http://yuiblog.com/ Mailing List @ Yahoo! Groups http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ydn-javascript/

A Query Language for the Web SELECT * FROM INTERNET

Before YQL Thousands of web services that provide valuable data Require developers to read documentation and form URLs/queries. Data is isolated and can not be combined Needs combining, tweaking, shaping even after it gets to the developer.

Y! Open Stack – YQL SQL-Like Language Synonymous with Data access Familiar to developers Expressive enough to get the right data Self Describing - show, desc table Allows you to query, lter and join data across Web Services.

developer.yahoo.com/yql/console/

YQL – Open Tables Twitter Flickr Google Upcoming Facebook Delicious Friendfeed Dopplr Wesabe Github Whitepages New York Times Zillow Shopping Search …any web service can be Weather as easy as SQL Available on github - http://github.com/spullara/yql-tables/

YQL – Open Tables

YQL - Examples select * from social.connections select * from delicious.feeds.popular select * from ickr.photos.interestingness select * from friendfeed.status select * from github.checkins

YQL – API End Points OAuth Endpoint http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/yql?q=... Public Endpoint http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q= YQL Console http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/console

Open Source Communities

http://www.symfony-project.org/jobeet/1_2/

Documentation http://www.symfony-project.org/doc Practical symfony - Jobeet The Denitive Guide to symfony The symfony Reference Guide symfony Forms in Action Doctrine ORM for PHP Cookbooks + Cheat sheets + Wiki API Documentation

Books worth reading

QUESTIONS? (I will be around, so please say hello and ask questions)

EXAMPLES | TUTORIALS | CODE SAMPLES DEVELOPER.YAHOO.COM

WANT TO JOIN YAHOO? WE ARE HIRING!

http://developer.yahoo.com	51
http://infuture.pixnet.net	45
http://developer.yahoo.net	37
http://coderwall.com	12
http://domon.posterous.com	8
http://www.slideshare.net	5
http://www.sfexception.com	2
http://feeds.developer.yahoo.net	1
http://www.techgig.com	1
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com	1
http://static.slidesharecdn.com	1
http://localhost:3000	1

OSDC.tw - Building a platform from open source

by Dustin Whittle

Accessibility

Categories

Upload Details

Usage Rights

12 Embeds 165

Statistics