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.

In the past few weeks I have been working like a mad man on putting together a frontend in time for the UN-connected.org conference. I have joined the Un-informed.org team as the sole IT guy some time in September last year. Since then I have posted to find people to help me, so far only Dennis Riedel has come through, well and of course Liip who have donated hosting and several days of development time, without which the site would not have been possible. Stefan Sicher also stepped up on short notice to make the site look good. But without a full stack framework like symfony it would also not have been possible. The source code for the application is available online for anyone to see.

A few days ago I announced my retirement from PHP core via twitter and the internals mailinglist. Actually I have always felt a bit weird calling myself being part of "PHP core" since in all the years I have never added any code to core, actually I have only removed some code as it was being moved to PECL. Anyway whatever you wanna call it, I ended up in a position where I could participate in many core decisions and finally even helping Johannes RMing 5.3 together for about a year. And like most open source developers I did what I did because I personally cared about the project and enjoyed being part of something that helps so many people in the world. Obviously it also helped my career and my employer in many ways. So all in all I put in time and I got a lot of things in return.