It seems like the Symfony2 CS is forbidding the use of private methods. I think other frameworks have similar rules. Now I have argued along those lines myself in the past. But especially talking to the Doctrine2 dev's got me to reconsider .. a bit. This all kinda of reminds me about the discussion over making it a fatal error to change method signatures during inheritance. I love PHP for allowing me to do this, yet giving me an E_STRICT, aka red tape, to make sure I am aware of the kittens that are being strung up this very moment. When I have coded myself into a corner, I need to get out of it quick, I do not need

A bit less than a year ago I last did a presentation about a telephone book application where we used SQL to do some fairly advanced filtering over about 30 tables of data. The app generated SQL statements that filled pages, the more terms the more pages, but on a 10k dataset it still came back within a few milliseconds, thanks to a ton of indexing and denormalization tricks (SQL Server is a lot more powerful here than MySQL) I had applied. Now in a more recent project I am dealing with 10M+ dataset running on MySQL and so decided to learn about Solr. Wow, that thing is amazing and way more flexible in terms of query language than I expected. As a result I do not see it any more for just projects that are too big for an RDBMS, but more as the way to do search in general. I have mentioned resolutionfinder.org a few times (used to be called UN-informed.org). Solr is a key piece there and more importantly I am looking to expand the use of Solr query language quite a bit. Actually for those who know, you can already do a lot more powerful queries, something Liip will be investing some more time to make more accessible to end users with some UI tweaks planned in July. But in this blog post I want to talk about a prototype class I threw together (Look ma', I'm using git!) by working ezcSearch to help me in parsing and transforming end user queries into complex Solr queries.

So William was asking on twitter how to best deploy symfony apps to a cluster of servers. There are actually some nice deployment tools inside the symfony cli that ease deployment to a single server, but that doesn't really cover the cluster case. Actually I assume that if you have a cluster of servers the best deployment strategy should probably be optimized against your specific use case. But let's make this question a bit more general: How do you deploy updates to your PHP apps running a clustered setup? What architecture do you pick? How do you keep the site running with as few limitations as possible during the update? How do you distribute the new code? How do you clean and prime your caches? How do you handle DB changes? How do you ensure that the DB and code changes do not get in the way of each other?

I have blogged about prepared statements a few times, which is what most people rely on (too much) for SQL injection protection. I say too much because they do not really protect code fully against SQL injection attacks and they come with a lot of performance hurting baggage. To sum up: prepared statements do not handle all aspects of dynamic SQL creation, they add network I/O and memory overhead and they tend to generate less optimal query plans. Some of these issues can be solved by doing client side emulation, but that brings with itself its share of issues and I have to agree with Bill and not Brian that parsing SQL should be left to the server.. So vendors, how about it? How about offering us a proper solution to prevent SQL injection attacks like I was asking for in my last post on the topic?

The current data on search.UN-informed.org is all inserted via an excel sheet importer. In the future we want to skip excel however and do the data entry right in the online database. For this I am working on the admintool. Right now all the tools are generated via the admin generator. However it seems the default dropdown's aren't really made to handle larger data sets. So in the filters and edit forms we run into issues since we have quite a number of tags, documents and clauses already. The numbers will only grow and its simply not feasible to load a list of 3000 options into a drop down. So I started to make use of the sfFormExtraPlugin, which provides a widget for autocomplete. However I had to add some features to really do what we needed.