hi folks, I am on a couple of php lists and on one of them we were having a discussion about scalable enterprise class systems to store images for things like user photo and file uploads, etc. and whether or not something existed in php to facilitate this. well the discussion inspired me and I created a scalable, cloud-like app written in php called phpdfs. first pre-alpha release went up monday: http://code.google.com/p/phpdfs/ a blog is here: http://phpdfs.blogspot.com/ if anyone is familiar with mogileFS, phpdfs does basically the same thing without the need of a central index to locate files across mutliple boxes. so bye bye mysql and associated problems and hello parallelism. phpdfs is pure php and is really quite easy to get going. phpdfs will replicate your data and will automatically and optimally move data when new resources are added (scaling out) and old resources are removed (scaling in). according to the authors of the algorithms upon which phpdfs is based, Yahoo, Symantec and LSI use the algorithms in some of their products and services. this is for real. currently I am testing the codebase as it is and doing a lot of empirical data collection to show correct object distribution and that minimal data is moved when the system is scaled out or in and that all data in the system is highly available. The formal proofs for the algorithms can be found in the white papers linked from the blog and the project home page. things are still very pre-alpha but usable and will get better and better :) if anyone wants to help out let me know. I hope the community finds this useful. peace, -Shane
