This week, at the Open Standards panel at Facebook’s f8 developer conference, I had the opportunity to talk about OAuth, OpenID, and other open standards. I did this with Facebook’s David Recordon, Luke Shepard, and Naitik Shah, along with Twitter’s Raffi Krikorian. Yahoo! was a very early supporter of OAuth, and we’re really happy to see OAuth become the industry standard for API authorization, with support from many service providers including Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, MySpace, Netflix, and now most recently… Facebook.

One of the big themes at the f8 conference was about lowering friction for users to engage with websites. Keeping with this theme, OAuth is about lowering friction for developers to engage with APIs. Before OAuth, developers had to read really bad documentation to learn proprietary terminology, use difficult signature algorithms, and perform weird browser gymnastics just to call an API. Despite the apparent differences, under the covers, all of these proprietary auth schemes were all about the same.

Because it doesn’t make any sense for everyone to reinvent the wheel, experts from throughout the industry collaborated to define OAuth 1.0, combining best practices from all the different auths into a standard interface. While a standard auth interface was intended to make things easier, it turned out that many developers found OAuth really hard to use, and Service Providers found OAuth 1.0 hard to implement.

After deploying OAuth, Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, and others realized that we could use the OAuth Session Extension to make OAuth super easy for developers to use, while solving many of the headaches that Service Providers had with deploying OAuth 1.0. After brainstorming at the Internet Identity Workshop, we wrote OAuth-WRAP (Web Resource Allocation Protocol), which defined an Auth interface that was so easy that no library was needed. Developers can just manually curl WRAP requests, or type them into their web browser. On the Service Provider side of things, WRAP far more scalable than OAuth 1.0 for highly distributed SaaS and cloud architectures. We thought that WRAP made a lot of sense, and we contributed it to the Internet Engineering Task Force(IETF), which served as the inspiration for OAuth 2.0.

Yahoo believes that OAuth and other open standards will help keep the web open and interoperable. It’s really gratifying seeing the major players and the grassroots community come together to define open standards and portable identities. If you’re interested in helping to define the future of Internet Identity using open standards, join us at the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View, CA on May 17-19.

Source:
http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2010/04/yahoo_and_open_standards_at_f8.html

Today, Social media marketing is a powerful way that will make your site profitable over time. In social media marketing (SMM), social network services are used. As the supporters list keeps increasing, faster you enter market and spread your business. So, social marketing is a fastest and excellent method to popularize the words on Internet world.

SMM makes use of videos, blogs, Forums, RSS feeds, Social networks such as Facebook, MySpace.
“Facebook has 200 billion users”
In early days of 2005 the social network users were limited to only 5% but it is continuously growing, presently the 40% of adults have profiles on social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and facebSook having highest number of hits per day. Creation of profile pages, applications, advertisements on social networking platforms can be very useful for achieving higher ROI.

“YouTube has 10 millions views”
Video Marketing is another trend in on line marketing. Today almost every social network allows video publishing. It is observed that good web videos not only make the interactive presentations but also increase the users views. According to com-score, US alone 17 Billion monthly videos watched. If the video is entertaining with high standard and appeals to the viewers then it passed on from one person to the other with proper recommendations. Good videos do effective advertisement and spreads product like wildfire.

“Information Sharing – Effective Marketing”
Blogs and Forums are popular medium for information sharing. These provide medium for people to create their own views or questions, and your opportunity to respond. These provide the information, news about the business and allow people to post their views or comments. These are the interactive medium for communication to involve directly with customers. As the supporters goes on increasing, faith of people also increases and thus increases the profitability in business.

Presenter: Lawrence Crowl

Source http://code.google.com/edu/languages/index.html#_cplus_newfeatures

Today I’m excited to share the project a small team of amazing people and I have been working on for the past two years; HipHop for PHP. With HipHop we’ve reduced the CPU usage on our Web servers on average by about fifty percent, depending on the page. Less CPU means fewer servers, which means less overhead. This project has had a tremendous impact on Facebook. We feel the Web at large can benefit from HipHop, so we are releasing it as open source this evening in hope that it brings a new focus toward scaling large complex websites with PHP. While HipHop has shown us incredible results, it’s certainly not complete and you should be comfortable with beta software before trying it out.

HipHop for PHP isn’t technically a compiler itself. Rather it is a source code transformer. HipHop programmatically transforms your PHP source code into highly optimized C++ and then uses g++ to compile it. HipHop executes the source code in a semantically equivalent manner and sacrifices some rarely used features — such as eval() — in exchange for improved performance. HipHop includes a code transformer, a reimplementation of PHP’s runtime system, and a rewrite of many common PHP Extensions to take advantage of these performance optimizations.

Scaling PHP as a Scripting Language

PHP’s roots are those of a scripting language, like Perl, Python, and Ruby, all of which have major benefits in terms of programmer productivity and the ability to iterate quickly on products. This is compared to more traditional compiled languages like C++ and interpreted languages like Java. On the other hand, scripting languages are known to generally be less efficient when it comes to CPU and memory usage. Because of this, it’s been challenging to scale Facebook to over 400 billion PHP-based page views every month.

One common way to address these inefficiencies is to rewrite the more complex parts of your PHP application directly in C++ as PHP Extensions. This largely transforms PHP into a glue language between your front end HTML and application logic in C++. From a technical perspective this works well, but drastically reduces the number of engineers who are able to work on your entire application. Learning C++ is only the first step to writing PHP Extensions, the second is understanding the Zend APIs. Given that our engineering team is relatively small — there are over one million users to every engineer — we can’t afford to make parts of our codebase less accessible than others.

Scaling Facebook is particularly challenging because almost every page view is a logged-in user with a customized experience. When you view your home page we need to look up all of your friends, query their most relevant updates (from a custom service we’ve built called Multifeed), filter the results based on your privacy settings, then fill out the stories with comments, photos, likes, and all the rich data that people love about Facebook. All of this in just under a second. HipHop allows us to write the logic that does the final page assembly in PHP and iterate it quickly while relying on custom back-end services in C++, Erlang, Java, or Python to service the News Feed, search, Chat, and other core parts of the site.

Since 2007 we’ve thought about a few different ways to solve these problems and have even tried implementing a few of them. The common suggestion is to just rewrite Facebook in another language, but given the complexity and speed of development of the site this would take some time to accomplish. We’ve rewritten aspects of the Zend Engine — PHP’s internals — and contributed those patches back into the PHP project, but ultimately haven’t seen the sort of performance increases that are needed. HipHop’s benefits are nearly transparent to our development speed.
Hacking Up HipHop

One night at a Hackathon a few years ago (see Prime Time Hack), I started my first piece of code transforming PHP into C++. The languages are fairly similar syntactically and C++ drastically outperforms PHP when it comes to both CPU and memory usage. Even PHP itself is written in C. We knew that it was impossible to successfully rewrite an entire codebase of this size by hand, but wondered what would happen if we built a system to do it programmatically.

Finding new ways to improve PHP performance isn’t a new concept. At run time the Zend Engine turns your PHP source into opcodes which are then run through the Zend Virtual Machine. Open source projects such as APC and eAccelerator cache this output and are used by the majority of PHP powered websites. There’s also Zend Server, a commercial product which makes PHP faster via opcode optimization and caching. Instead, we were thinking about transforming PHP source directly into C++ which can then be turned into native machine code. Even compiling PHP isn’t a new idea, open source projects like Roadsend and phc compile PHP to C, Quercus compiles PHP to Java, and Phalanger compiles PHP to .Net.

Needless to say, it took longer than that single Hackathon. Eight months later, I had enough code to demonstrate it is indeed possible to run faster with compiled code. We quickly added Iain Proctor and Minghui Yang to the team to speed up the pace of the project. We spent the next ten months finishing up all the coding and the following six months testing on production servers. We are proud to say that at this point, we are serving over 90% of our Web traffic using HipHop, all only six months after deployment.
How HipHop Works

The main challenge of the project was bridging the gap between PHP and C++. PHP is a scripting language with dynamic, weak typing. C++ is a compiled language with static typing. While PHP allows you to write magical dynamic features, most PHP is relatively straightforward. It’s more likely that you see if (…) {…} else {..} than it is to see function foo($x) { include $x; }. This is where we gain in performance. Whenever possible our generated code uses static binding for functions and variables. We also use type inference to pick the most specific type possible for our variables and thus save memory.

The transformation process includes three main steps:
1. Static analysis where we collect information on who declares what and dependencies,
2. Type inference where we choose the most specific type between C++ scalars, String, Array, classes, Object, and Variant, and
3. Code generation which for the most part is a direct correspondence from PHP statements and expressions to C++ statements and expressions.

We have also developed HPHPi, which is an experimental interpreter designed for development. When using HPHPi you don’t need to compile your PHP source code before running it. It’s helped us catch bugs in HipHop itself and provides engineers a way to use HipHop without changing how they write PHP.

Overall HipHop allows us to keep the best aspects of PHP while taking advantage of the performance benefits of C++. In total, we have written over 300,000 lines of code and more than 5,000 unit tests. All of this will be released this evening on GitHub under the open source PHP license.
Learn More this Evening

This evening we’re hosting a small group of developers to dive deeper into HipHop for PHP and will be streaming this tech talk live. Check back here around 7:30pm Pacific time if you’d like to watch.

As I’m sure there will be plenty of questions, starting this evening take a look at the HipHop wiki or join the HipHop developer mailing list. You’ll also find us at FOSDEM, SCALE, PHP UK, ConFoo, TEK X, and OSCON over the next few months talking about HipHop for PHP. We’re very excited to evolve HipHop into a thriving open source project along with all of you.

Source :

http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/358

It is a successor to traditional WWW (Collection of static pages with limited functionality). Most of the technology components of WEB 2.0 have belong to early days of the Web. Web 2.0 is a strong combination of several technologies and aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, user interaction, and innovation, rich desktop experience, thus making the application usage faster and simpler.

The technology infrastructure that WEB 2.0 includes several techniques such content syndication, Rich Internet Application Techniques, Inter site Communication Techniques, Mashups, and rich Server softwares.

• The Rich Internet Applications techniques produce the rich desktop experience, making the web pages more interactive and responsive. Web page can update alter the content of web page without reloading or refreshing. RIAs also provide dynamic effects and animations on web page making it more and more eye catching. Several technologies are evolved such as Style Sheets, DMTML, AJAX, Adobe Flash, Flex, Java, ActiveX, Silverlight providing rich user-experience in browser-based applications.
• Inter site Communication is the most important feature of WEB 2.0. It involves use of web apis (web services) and make the application highly distributed. SOAP and REST are most popular and common approaches to achieve.
• Mashup are the web applications that integrate the content from multiple resources at a single location. Web Services (API), public interfaces, RSS feeds are used to fetch content from different resources. Importing the photos from FLICKER using SOAP based API is meshup example.
• XML and RSS Content Syndication is an important WEB 2.0 feature. It uses XML to present site content in different formats such as RSS, RDF, and Atom. With RSS usage users not only hyper-link to page but subscribes to it, with notification occurs every time the content changes.

Conclusion

WEB 2.0 has revolutionized World Wide Web, making applications more interactive easy to use, simpler and stylish. The differing but complementary approaches provide Web 2.0 with information-storage, creation, and dissemination capabilities that go beyond what the public formerly expected of websites and its going to be a new experience altogether.

Source

http://developer.yahoo.net/blogs/theater/archives/2007/12/high_performance_ajax_applications.html

]]> http://blogs.tronixs.com/?feed=rss2&p=32 0 http://blogs.tronixs.com/?p=35 http://blogs.tronixs.com/?p=35#comments Tue, 16 Feb 2010 12:36:09 +0000 admin http://blogs.tronixs.com/?p=35 Already getting a YSlow “A”? Looking for more ways to make your pages faster and improve Roundtrip scores? This talk is for you!

The latest Exceptional Performance breakthroughs are making their Sunnyvale debut. We have not only updated the existing 14 rules, but also added 20 new recommendations to accelerate the end-user’s experience.

Nicole Sullivan and Stoyan Stefanov from the Exceptional Performance team guide you through high performance servers, cookies, content, JavaScript, CSS, images, and mobile. Join us in a discussion of some of the highlights: optimizing images, to sprite or not to sprite?, JavaScript event handlers, alpha filters (eww!), taking advantage of iPhone’s cache, and more. This talk is appropriate to engineers, product managers, UED, and (of course) web developers. Site-up and especially performance are important Yahoo! priorities.

Source
http://developer.yahoo.net/blogs/theater/archives/2008/07/already_getting_a_yslow_a.html

Linux Kernel
The Android OS stack has key component, kernel. The kernel acts as an abstraction layer between the hardware and the software stack. Android’s Kernel is based on Linux version 2.6 and provides set of core services like memory management, process management, power management and a rich hardware drivers support that control various hardware devices like camera, accelometer, Bluetooth, USB and many more. Android also features permission based security model.

Android Libraries and DVM
The next level includes a set of C/C++ libraries used by various components of the Android system. These libraries are exposed to the developers through Android application framework. All the applications are for Android are written using Java programming language. Some of the common libraries are described below:

• Media Libraries – based on PacketVideo’s OpenCORE; the libraries support playback and recording of many popular audio and video formats, as well as static image files, including MPEG4, H.264, MP3, AAC, AMR, JPG, and PNG
• 3D libraries – an implementation based on OpenGL ES 1.0 APIs; the libraries use either hardware 3D acceleration (where available) or the included, highly optimized 3D software rasterizer.
• SQLite – a powerful and lightweight relational database engine available to all applications.
• LibWebCore – a modern web browser engine which powers both the Android browser and an embeddable web view.

Here in this layer Android runtime is also present and this includes a set of core libraries that facilating the application development easier.
The core libraries also constitute Dalvik Virtual Machine. DVM is responsible for running the compiled java classes. The java files are compiled into Dalvik executables (.dex) format and optimised for minimum memory footprint. Every application runs with its own instance of DVM and in its own process. This unified architecture of DVM provides the features like independent execution of applications, If one application crashes then it does not effect other. Further, is register based and has capibility to run multiple VMs efficiently. The Dalvik VM relies on the Linux kernel for underlying functionality such as threading and low-level memory management.

Application Framework
Then there comes application framework, providing the developers have full access to the same framework APIs used by the core applications. This simplify the reuse of components, allowing them to take advantage of Android’s processing capabilities and support features when building an Android application. Think of the application framework as a set of basic tools with which a developer can build much more complex tools.

Application Framework
Then there comes application framework, providing the developers have full access to the same framework APIs used by the core applications. This simplify the reuse of components, allowing them to take advantage of Android’s processing capabilities and support features when building an Android application. Think of the application framework as a set of basic tools with which a developer can build much more complex tools.

Application Framework has set of services and systems,, making the ease of application development :

• A rich and extensible set of Views that can be used to build an application, with grids, text boxes, buttons, and even an embeddable web browser.
• Content Providers that enable applications to access data from other applications (such as Contacts), or to share their own data.
• A Resource Manager, providing access to non-code resources such as localized strings, graphics, bitmaps and layout files.
• A Notification Manager that enables all applications to display custom alerts in the status bar.

Application Stack
At the top of the stack are the applications themselves. Android includes a set of core applications including an email client, SMS program, calendar, maps, browser, contacts, and others. This is the top most layer available to end users to digg the phone capabilities. Only programmers, application developers and hardware manufacturers access the other layers further down the stack.
References

http://developer.android.com

*Originally recorded on October 10, 2009.

Source

http://developer.yahoo.net/blogs/theater/archives/2010/02/open_yahoo_cody_simms.html

(First things first, by cookie we do not mean a biscuit.)

Cookies are a very very important method for maintaining state on the Web.

“State” in this case refers to an application’s ability to work interactively with a user, remembering all data since the application started, and differentiating between users and their individual data sets.

(An analogy I’d like to use is my laundry man’s shop. You drop something off, and get a ticket. When you return with the ticket, you get your clothes back. If you don’t have the ticket, then the laundry man doesn’t know which clothes are yours. In fact, he won’t be able to tell whether you are there to pick up clothes, or a brand new customer. As such, the ticket is critical to maintaining state between you and the laundry man.)

When we connect to the internet for browsing we make use of HTTP, Unfortunately, HTTP is a “stateless” protocol. This means that each visit to a site (or even clicks within a site) is seen by the server as the first visit by the user. In essence, the server “forgets” everything after each request, unless it can somehow mark a visitor (that is, hand him a “laundry ticket”) to help it remember.

Cookies are used to accomplish this.

Again, what is a Cookie?

A Cookie is a small bit of textual information sent by the web server to the web browser, which is again returned by the web browser unchanged, to the web server when the web browser returns to the same web page/site.

Cookies can’t create any serious security threats to the system because cookies are neither interpreted nor executed. A cookie is a text-only string that gets entered into the memory of your browser.

Why do sites use Cookies or the Benefits of Cookies? There are many reasons a given site would wish to use cookies.

· These range from the ability to personalize information (like on My Yahoo or Excite), or to help with on-line sales/services (like on Amazon Books or eBay), or simply for the purposes of collecting demographic information (like DoubleClick).

· Remembering Username and Password: many websites require user to register with them & during registration you need to specify username and password (apart from other information, of course)

· Identifying a user during an e-commerce session: Online stores make use of ‘Shopping Cart’ metaphor to allow the customers to purchase from the online store. While adding a new item to the ‘Shopping Cart’, the server identifies the customer who added the last item, using cookies.

· Cookies also provide programmers with a quick and convenient means of keeping site content fresh and relevant to the user’s interests. The newest servers use cookies to help with back-end interaction as well, which can improve the utility of a site by being able to securely store any personal data that the user has shared with a site (to help with quick logins on your favorite sites, for example).

What are the problems with Cookies?

The sad truth is that revealing any kind of personal information opens the door for that information to be spread. Consider the growing trend of technology conveniences in our lives. We use “frequent buyer” cards at supermarkets and gas stations. We place electronic tags on our cars to pay tolls faster and easier. We let banks pay our bills for us automatically each month without checks. We also use a search engine to search for different stuff. While each of these technologies (and others like them) has made our lives more convenient, each time we use them exposes us to a loss of privacy. Stores know what foods you eat. Gas stations know how much you spend on gas per fill-up. Turnpike operators know how fast you drive on their highways. Banks know how you spend your money each month. The search engine remembers your last search and puts a banner advertisement associated to your search.It’s the same with cookies. In fact, one may argue that cookies in the long-run will be less damaging to privacy efforts than those technologies described above. If you’re going to single-out cookies as your sole vulnerability to personal privacy, you should re-examine how you live your daily life. The never-ending ethical debate associated with these facts shall be left to other forums. However, it is wise to consider carefully the information you collect and share over the Internet.