On Wed, 2005-12-14 at 20:50, Christopher Jordan wrote: > > When you said: > > "...the strength and simplicity of PHP stem from the decision to make/keep > PHP a 'share nothing' architecture." > > What did you mean, by that? I've not heard of this "share nothing" > idea. What is the idea of "share nothing" and why is it a strength? > I'd like to understand so if I'm doing something ass-backwards > (read: inefficiently), that I can change what I'm doing. "Share nothing" refers to the PHP philosophy of not tying any data sharing system to the engine itself. In this way developers are free to create applications in such a way that if they need more power, they can just add more computers. This becomes a much more difficult issue when a program holds private data in memory that requires a specific way to access it. For instance if you stored some kind of application variable in memory (a la ColdFusion, Java, ASP) then this value would not be normally transparent to other computers without some kind of synchronization system to transfer it around. Then you run into race condition and deadlock issues. Using the share nothing philosophy such data doesn't generally exist, and if it does, then it is stored in a database. Databases are a better system for such data since they were designed for heterogeneous external access and quite handily solve the race condition and deadlock issues. That said, you can also use database replication so that multiple databases servers have an image of the same database, thus allowing even the database server to scale horizontally. So how does this relate to your mom and pop requirements... it doesn't really *lol*, but if you ever create something that becomes the next Google, it might just scale to a server farm of thousands of computers. Cheers, Rob. -- .------------------------------------------------------------. | InterJinn Application Framework - http://www.interjinn.com | :------------------------------------------------------------: | An application and templating framework for PHP. Boasting | | a powerful, scalable system for accessing system services | | such as forms, properties, sessions, and caches. InterJinn | | also provides an extremely flexible architecture for | | creating re-usable components quickly and easily. | `------------------------------------------------------------' -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
