Part 1: A Technology Overview

by Justin Leider on July 21, 2008

This will be the first post in a multi-part series, each of the following installations will detail the technologies and implementations of the upcoming CitySquares revision. I hope to cover the entire page generation process, starting with the user's first request to the resulting dynamically generated HTML, CSS, JS, etc. Before I dive too deep into the technical aspect of things I would like to give a brief overview of what is to come.

For starters, CitySquares currently owns and operates its own servers in a co-location not far from our headquarters. This will be the first thing to go as we switch to Amazon's EC2 and S3 in conjunction with RightScale. By switching off of our own hardware we will absolve ourselves of this oft troublesome and physically limiting layer. By using RightScale's server templates and management scripts we can control the precise number of servers in operation. Coping with increased or decreased load will be handled autonomously throught the RightScale interface, no more DoS by SlashDot and more more wasted cycles during off peak hours. Our server deployment will contain a few different types, each one specially tuned and selected for its specific purpose. Without getting into too much detail here, our deployment will consist of the following:

  • HA Proxy for load balancing

  • Apache with PHP and XCache

  • Memcached

  • MySQL master/slave configuration

  • File server with automated revisioning, concatenation and minimization of css, js, etc

  • Tomcat with SOLR search engine

Once setup, most of the overhead associated with operating our own IT infrastructure will be removed from the equation.

Not only will our IT situation improve but our coding environment will change dramatically as we move away from Drupal's more primitive procedural style coding practice and towards Symfony's OOP style. Symfony is a PHP based MVC (Model, View Controller) framework. It is loosely based on RoR's (Ruby on Rails) best practices for codability and maintainability. We will be using it with the Doctrine ORM (Object Relational Mapping) and Smarty templating engine. These architectural and IT changes will work to promote a cleaner, more efficient and maintainable coding practice. In the end all these disruptive changes will be justified, allowing us to focus on what we do best, provide users with hyper-local search results.

Turning the page — PHP, Symfony, ORM

by Justin Leider on July 18, 2008

php-med-trans-lightI have come to the conclusion that I should be cataloging my work, thoughts, theories and activities for others to read and learn from my experiences as a web engineer. Let me begin by mentioning I work at a company called CitySquares and for the last year I have been working diligently on the current CitySquares site.

This has been a great year for me as I was given the opportunity to learn the inner workings of the Drupal CMS. While Drupal is a great CMS/Framework, it is inherently still a prepackaged CMS designed for things that 99% of the community needs. CitySquares unfortunately falls within that other 1%. I must say that we have accomplished quite a bit using Drupal's community modules in conjunction with our own custom written ones. However, there are plans in the works that we would like to implement but just cant within the Drupal framework.

Although all is not lost. With the current iteration running and stable and gaining traffic every week I have the opportunity to turn the page and begin work on the next phase of development. This is an exciting time and I will use this medium to convey the successes as well as the issues as development here continues.

That said, we have decided to scrap our Drupal based architecture in favor of a more extensible framework, Symfony. Symfony is a PHP based OO architecture that resembles Ruby on Rails. Not only will we gain the benefit of switching to a OO style framework but we will be using Doctrine as our ORM and Smarty as our template engine.

The idea is that this combination of technologies will help us alleviate two of the major problems we have with Drupal, essentially scalability and codability. Ive been toying with some ideas to help eliminate these two thorns in our side that I will discuss at a later time but look forward to hearing my ideas on a full stack horizontal architecture.