5th Day

We went to an indian restaurant for lunch today. Indian food might be a good option if you want to taste something different occasionally. But it definitely could not stay on your long term diet list. Indian food features with curry and spicy. A survey shows XX% of indians suffer diabetes, because they like to put coco milk in their food.

My project's functional spec is done. Now i need to set up the framework, design the database and classes.

4th day

infrastructure upgrade

since we have more applications coming up, we need to upgrade infrastructure. However, we don't want to jump a big step once. We need to upgrade, get better performance, while still save cost.

The current status is we have one server, all applications and databases are running on this server. We think about having 4 servers, 1 of them works as database server. The rest work as application server and implement load balance. But this plan seem too big for us at the moment.

At the end, we reach an agreement that we just get 1 more server. So we have two servers, 1 for databases, the other 1 for applications.

We will see how this works at the moment. If our business keeps growing, we definitely need to upgrade our hardware platform later.

3rd Day

First meeting on Functional Spec

2nd Day

Keep working on functional specification

Some issues to figure out: WAP Page, Architecture, Framework, Report

First day

1. Set up my development environment

2. Suggest using bug track system

3. Suggest and start to work on functional specification

Mysql Optimization - schema optimization

1. Choose optimal data type
a. smaller is better - less space on disk, in memory, in CPU cache
b. simple is good (use integer instead of ip address, for example);
c. avoid null if possible - null requires special processing, makes index, comparisons more complicated.

2.Index strategies
a. isolate the column. mysql can't use index unless the columns are isolated in query
e.g., suppose id is primary key.
select * from test where id+1 = 5; should be changed to select * from test where id = 4

b. Prefix index
e.g., if u need to index long character columns, index the first few characters
alter table test add key (long_name(5));
downside is prefix index cannot be used for order by or group by

c. covering indexex
e.g. an index containing all the data needed for a query is covering index
-index entries are smaller and faster than row size
-indexes are sorted by their values

Normalization and Denormalization
A mixture of Normalized and Denormalized

Zend framework Zend_Acl

Acl stands for action control list.

The typical flow for using Zend_Acl in a web application is as follows:
1. Instantiate the Zend_Acl class (let’s call this object $acl).
2. Add one or more roles to $acl using the addRole() method.
3. Add resources to $acl using the add() method.
4. Add the full list of privileges for each role (that is, use allow() or deny() to indicate which resources roles have access to).
5. Use the isAllowed() method on $acl to determine whether a particular role has access
to a particular resource/privilege combination.
6. Repeat step 5 as often as necessary while the script executes.

Example:
$this->auth = $auth;
$this->acl = new Zend_Acl();
//add the different user role
$this->acl->addRole(new Zend_Acl_Role($this->_defaultRole));
$this->acl->addRole(new Zend_Acl_Role('admin'));
$this->acl->addRole(new Zend_Acl_Role('member'));
$this->acl->addRole(new Zend_Acl_Role('administrator'), 'member');
// add the resources we want to have control over
$this->acl->add(new Zend_Acl_Resource('account'));
$this->acl->add(new Zend_Acl_Resource('admin'));

// allow access to everything for all users by default
// except for the account management and administration areas
$this->acl->allow();
$this->acl->deny(null, 'account');
$this->acl->deny(null, 'admin');
// add an exception so guests can log in or register
// in order to gain privilege
$this->acl->allow('guest', 'account', array('login', 'fetchpassword' , 'register' , 'registercomplete'));
// allow members access to the account management area
$this->acl->allow('member', 'account');
$this->acl->allow('admin', 'admin');

public function preDispatch (Zend_Controller_Request_Abstract $request)
{
// check if a user is logged in and has a valid role,
// otherwise, assign them the default role (guest)
if ($this->auth->hasIdentity()) {
$role = $this->auth->getIdentity()->subscription_type;
} else {
$role = $this->_defaultRole;
}
if (! $this->acl->hasRole($role)) {
$role = $this->_defaultRole;
}
// the ACL resource is the requested controller name
$resource = $request->controller;
// the ACL privilege is the requested action name
$privilege = $request->action;
// if we haven't explicitly added the resource, check
// the default global permissions
if (! $this->acl->has($resource))
$resource = null;
// access denied - reroute the request to the default action handler
if (! $this->acl->isAllowed($role, $resource, $privilege)) {
$request->setControllerName($this->_authController['controller']);
$request->setActionName($this->_authController['action']);
}
}

in bootstrap file, we add
$frontController->registerPlugin(new ControllerAclManager($auth));