A simple Amazon SNS client in PHP
After reading the announcement for the new Amazon AWS product, Amazon SNS (Simple Notifcation Service) it seemed like a great idea, though there is as yet no PHP sample code provided.
If you've not seen it, it's a cloud notification service - it allows creation of "topics" (think a mailing list / channel) and management of subscribers to the topics. Interestingly subscribers don't have to be just email - they can be http / SQS subscribers too. However, I'm most interested in the email functionality.
I've written a simple client in PHP which I've put on github - you can get it here. Please note, it's about an hours work and doesn't include any error checking at all...but it works.
Enjoy.
Picking the best weekday for a website launch
Picking the best weekday for a website launch can be difficult. When considering it, there are a number of key things to take in to account:
Expected traffic / business volume
Launching on the busiest day of the month is not likely to be the best choice - a trail by fire can be risky especially for a major launch. Picking a quiet time of the month - check your sales & website analytics - will mean less lost revenue & annoyed customers and stress if things do go wrong.
Developer availability
Launching at the end of the week might seem like a nice way of finishing the week off - but teething problems might mean work over the weekend. This isn't good for keeping your developers happy!
Launching early in the week (unless of course this is your busiest period) is going to mean more normal working time to work on any (hopefully minor) issues you come across. Should there be a disaster, the whole team will be around anyway.
Support availability
Although your hosting provider probably does operate over a weekend, they are likely to have more staff around during normal working hours.
Phoning them before hand will be a good idea to make sure:
- There are no scheduled maintenance windows of their network, your server or any of their peers.
- If they manage backups that there is a current one (can't hurt to ask if you can't check yourself for some reason).
- They have staff around at the time you are expecting to launch and that they are aware this is happening - this is especially important if they monitor your servers (they may think something has failed).
The last slice of Cake?
The lead developer of CakePHP, Nate Abele, today waved good by to Cake in a quick tweet about the project. Reports are that he is joining some of the Cake team working on a fork of Cake3 to be called “Lithium”.
Nate later confirms;
Yup, myself and most of the old team have spun off a new project called #Lithium (http://li3.rad-dev.org), based on PHP 5.3"
Awesome, another 5.3 framework - I'll be following Lithium's development as it occurs.
Symfony is one of the first major PHP frameworks planning to drop support for 5.2
Symfony 2.0 will leverage PHP 5.3 and drop PHP 5.2 compatibility. Big news - Symfony is one of the first major PHP frameworks to drop support for 5.2, though its not happening for some time.
Both the upcoming Zend Framework and CakePHP 2.0 versions will rely on PHP 5.3. And for Symfony, I said it will still be compatible with PHP 5.2. From my point of view at the time, it would be a mistake to upgrade major frameworks to PHP 5.3 now for one main reason: major frameworks are used by many big companies, and upgrading to the latest version of a software fast in such companies is not always feasible.
Symfony 2.0 is due to be released late 2010. Read some more on the Symfony blog.