Interleave Just Got Better
Monday, February 23rd, 2009
.. thanks to me.
I just wanted to toot my own horn and let everyone know that a modification I made to our local Centre for Teaching, Learning and Educational Technologies “Client Relationship Manager” (AKA any other set of words that match CRM) called INTERLEAVE will be incorporated into the next release.
Interleave is a (business) process automation application and what I implemented to track my own work at Brock University. It allows me to stay on top of issues and names, and ultimately be able hand-off issues with some accountability and be able to report on the work I do year-to-year.
Our installation was getting a little slow, and I had tracked it to having a lot of clients and that creating a lot of communication between the web server and the database in certain situations. INTERLEAVE has it’s own caching infrastructure to speed this situations up so I took a look at it and just wrote some simple PHP code around it to have it store the cached items inAPC’s cache instead of the database.
This is an advantage because APC implements shared memory in PHP (among other things) and that allows to be stored between transmission between the web server and the client WITHOUT the need for a database, or the internal communication and overhead that requires. There a number of tools that do this for PHP, but APC is the one that should be included into PHP 6.
How shared memory works
If a web server fronted to a database could be considered a place like the post office, having shared memory copies of things is like walking up to the person at the front desk and asking “Is there any mail in back for me?” and the immediate response from the top of the postmaster’s head being “Your mother says you don’t write enough and Rogers wants you to buy a home phone” — with similar security concerns.
After learning today that Groundhogs have about a 30% accuracy record for predicting the end of winter I’ve decided to get in the game myself: I’ve flipped a coin.