Here’s the scenario: you’ve written a PHP application designed to run on Linux, Apache, and MySQL. Now you have a customer who wants to run it on Windows. Or using Oracle. Or they like Memcache instead of APC. How do you do it without sacrificing performance, stability, simplicity, and your own sanity? In this talk we’ll look at how we approached solving this problem at SugarCRM and what lessons we learned in the process.

1. Developing Easily Deployable PHP Applications John Mertic - SugarCRM http://joind.in/2059 @2010 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved.

2. Why deployable apps still matter 7/22/2010 @2010 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 2

3. What I’ll cover Writing portable code Enabling configuration and customization Strategies for testing and QA Making your code perform well @2010 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 7/22/2010 3

4. Writing portable code 7/22/2010 @2010 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 4 Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/25339258@N05/2389910825/

5. Define your support matrix Operating System Any Linux, UNIX, OS X Windows Web Server Apache 1.3, 2.0, 2.2 IIS 6/7 using FastCGI Database MySQL 5.0, 5.1 SQL Server 2005, 2008 Oracle 9i, 10g PHP 5.2.x, 5.3.x Support most common configurations options mbstring.func_overload error_reporting = E_ALL Require only the most mainline extensions, plus Mbstrings ( i18n support ) Imap ( mail support ) Specific database extension ( mysql, mysqli, oci8, mssql, sqlsrv ) 7/22/2010 @2010 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 5

6. Design code that works for these platforms DB abstraction layer or ORM Make sure PHP features you are using are supported across support matrix Assume very little about the underlying system Example: Treat file system as case-sensitive, and file writes are only in one area. Detect what features the server has for you to use, have API to talk to them Example: User cache ( APC, Memcache, Wincache, etc ) 7/22/2010 @2010 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 6

7. Build and deploy! We build all 3 editions of SugarCRM from 1 codebase We add code tags around sections specific to a certain version. To test under each different edition, developers can run the build locally We also can tag in or out features on a per edition basis. 7/22/2010 @2010 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 7 Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eastcapital/4554220770/

8. Enabling configuration and customization 7/22/2010 @2010 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 8 Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/miskypig/400004362/

9. Making it simple yet powerful for end users Expose configuration options thru multiple channels Remember, not everyone has source access Allow users to customize their UI interface easily Make what should be simple, simple 7/22/2010 @2010 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 9

10. Making it simple yet powerful for developers Create a safe place to make customizations Avoid painful upgrades Create an easy to use API Well defined and supported. Don’t break it! Create easy to use hooks for modifying / adding functionality Examples from SugarCRM include: Metadata driven views Logic Hooks Allow for internationalization and localization 7/22/2010 @2010 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 10

11. Strategies for testing and QA 7/22/2010 @2010 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 11 Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cglock/386033158/

12. Testing different configurations Impossible for us to test every single permutation, so we use VM stacks instead Windows Vista IIS-7 (FastCGI) PHP 5.2.8 MSSQL-2005 (PHP mssql driver) Windows Server 2003 IIS-6 (FastCGI) PHP 5.2.11 MSSQL-2005 (PHP mssql driver) CentOS 5 Apache-2.2.11 PHP 5.2.9 MySQL-5.1.33 Windows Server 2008 IIS-7 (FastCGI) PHP 5.3.1 MSSQL-2008 (Microsoft sqlsrv driver 1.1) Windows XP Apache-1.3.41 PHP 5.2.13 MySQL-5.0.83 Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.1 Apache-2.0.63 PHP 5.3.2 ORCL-10g We test both new installations and upgrade scenarios; even customer instances! 7/22/2010 @2010 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 12

13. Automated Testing Tools Hudson (http://hudson-ci.org/) – Extensible CI Server Running on every checkin PHP lint ( php –l ) – Syntax checking for PHP source files PHPUnit (http://www.phpunit.de/) – Unit testing framework Runs once a day SODA – functional testing framework that leverages Watir SodaMachine – GUI tool for building SODA tests JMeter (http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/) - tool for testing a website under high load MeterMaid – XML language to write JMeter tests in SugarMMM (MeterMaid Maker) - utility to automate writing MeterMaid tests for SugarCRM TidBit – tool to make huge datasets for testing All runs are against all flavors and all supported platform stacks 7/22/2010 @2010 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 13

14. Making your code perform well 7/22/2010 @2010 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 14 Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tech1987/501427718/

15. What we do to help performance Try to do the basic stuff Avoid writing slow code Caching, and lots of it Combine, minify, and version JS / CSS / images Keep SQL queries as simple as possible Leave the rest to the Sys Admin Provide configuration options to turn off heavy features Enable the application to take advantage of it’s environment Example: Using APC, memcache, Zend_Cache, wincache with little to no configuration Provide best practices for various environments 7/22/2010 @2010 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 15

16. How we gauge performance Formal testing Use Jmeter (http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/) on a load test cluster to test raw response speed. Instance analysis Monitor web server logs to look for non-cached items Track slow queries Ad-hoc testing Profile PHP execution with XDebug Use Firebug to measure CSS / JS / image payload 7/22/2010 @2010 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 16

17. What are the lessons we have learned? Define what you will support and to what extent Write your code to be flexible to any environment Make customizing, configuring, and extending your application not painful for users or developers Test across your support matrix, using automation as much as possible Focus more on best practices and general performance, let admins handle it from there. 10/9/10 @2010 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 17 Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dlanod/126386070/

18. About me and my company John Mertic http://jmertic.wordpress.com Twitter: @jmertic jmertic@sugarcrm.com ( Work ) jmertic@php.net ( PHP ) Slides available on slidesharehttp://slidesha.re/9LX3Jp SugarCRM http://www.sugarcrm.com We’re hiring! Learn more about SugarCRM’s open source tools at http://developers.sugarcrm.com/opensource 7/22/2010 @2010 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 18 Buy my book!

19. Questions? Please give feedback at http://joind.in/2059 7/22/2010 @2010 SugarCRM Inc. All rights reserved. 19