SEARCH KEYWORD -- HTTP Server

  Performance is a Feature

We've always put a heavy emphasis on performance at Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. Not just because we're performance wonks (guilty!), but because we think speed is a competitive advantage. There's plenty of experimental data proving that the slower your website loads and displays, the less people will use it. [Google found that] the page with 10 results took 0.4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took 0.9 seconds. Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a seco...

   Website,Perfomance,Optimization     2011-07-02 01:52:12

  Learning Is More Important Than Knowing

Although DuckDuckGo's success is based more on ideology than technology, you'd have to be a pretty arrogant technologist to not appreciate and be impressed with what this small team (for a long time, 1 person) has accomplished. And while DuckDuckGo teaches us a number of valuable lessons (about business, and privacy), to me, the most important, is that good programmers should be measured by what they can learn, not what they already know. Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo's creator, has been wo...

   Learning,Knowing,Google,DuckDuckGo     2012-04-18 07:17:53

  Automatically post to Facebook from PHP script

Facebook is currently on of the most important publishing and traffic generating sources for many websites. Manually Cross publishing content on your own site and Facebook seems like a lot of extra work. This post guides you through the creation of a Facebook application that can automatically post messages and other types of content on your Facebook wall. Getting started Building a php script that automatically posts status updates on your wall requires the following steps: Download Faceboo...

   PHP,Facebook,API,Auto post,OAuth     2012-02-27 09:03:00

  Simple Animation in the HTML5 Canvas Element

HTML5 is generating all kinds of buzz these days. Some of the buzz is about HTML5 being a replacement for Adobe’s Flash. I don’t think it’s there yet but it’s certainly on the way to changing the way content is presented on the web. This is a description of a very simple animation in an HTML5 canvas element. It is coded for readability and not for optimized operation. We’ll add a canvas element to a web page and then use javascript to draw on it. We will...

   HTML5,Canvas,Animation,Sample code     2011-07-01 10:20:08

  Replacing small C programs with Haskell

C is the classic go-to tool for small programs that need to be really fast. When scripts.mit.edu needed a small program to be a glorified cat that also added useful HTTP headers to the beginning of its output, there was no question about it: it would be written in C, and it would be fast; the speed of our static content serving depended on it! (The grotty technical details: our webserver is based off of a networked filesystem, and we wanted to avoid giving Apache too many credentials in ca...

   C,Haskell,Small program     2012-01-03 10:51:39

  How to send asynchronous requests in PHP

It’s easy to make asynchronous calls in PHP with just a little bit of HTTP header knowledge and some library code around PHP sockets. This technique is useful when posting requests to your own server for bits of logic you’d like to run in the background.  If you don’t control the endpoint, you might not be comfortable with some of the limitations, such as the inability to read anything from the response.  So, you couldn’t post data to a we...

   PHP,Asynchronous request,socket     2012-04-28 06:45:51

  Why isn't all internet traffic encrypted?

The biggest problem is that you must be able to verify that you're encrypting to the correct key. Without it, encryption would be practically useless, as anyone could perform a man-in-the-middle attack on the connection and remain undetected.In typical SSL/TLS, as well as other protocols using X.509, this verification is performed by "certification authorities", which are explicitly marked as "trusted" by web browsers and operating systems. Unfortunately, these CAs usual...

   Internet,Traffic,Encryption,Decryption,Security     2011-10-15 15:03:37

  Building a Modern Web Stack for the Real-time Web

The web is evolving. After a few years of iteration the WebSockets spec is finally here (RFC 6455), and as of late 2011 both Chrome and Firefox are SPDY capable. These additions are much more than just "enhancing AJAX", as we now have true real-time communication in the browser: stream multiplexing, flow control, framing, and significant latency and performance improvements. Now, we just need to drag our "back office" - our web frontends, app servers, and everything in between into this cen...

   Web design,Real-time web,web stack     2012-02-15 05:54:41

  Database Testing – Practical Tips and Insight on How to Test Database

Database is one of the inevitable parts of a software application these days. It does not matter at all whether it is web or desktop, client server or peer to peer, enterprise or individual business, database is working at backend. Similarly, whether it is healthcare of finance, leasing or retail, mailing application or controlling spaceship, behind the scene a database is always in action. Moreover, as the complexity of application increases the need of stronger and secure database emerge...

   Database,Tips,Practice     2011-06-29 08:47:40

  Why Dynamic Programming Languages Are Slow

In a statically typed language, the compiler knows the data-type of a variable and how to represent that. In a dynamically-typed language, it has to keep flag describing the actual type of the value of the variable, and the program has to perform a data-dependent branch on that value each time it manipulates a variable.  It also has to look up all methods and operators on it. The knock-on effect of this on branching and data locality is lethal to general purpose runtime performance. T...

   Dynamic language,Slow,Analysis     2012-03-26 15:33:11

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