Rapid Web News

A boom in Internet businesses could open hundreds of thousands of jobs in Britain within five years, a Google chief has claimed.

Philipp Schindler, the London based vice-president of Google Europe, predicted that despite the economic downturn 365,000 jobs could be on the cards by 2015 as more online firms emerge and grow.

Daily Mail article

Could new Internet businesses such as e-commerce websites start a new wave of employment in the UK, generating thousands of new jobs based around these businesses?

This is what Philipp Schindler, the London based vise-president of Google Europe seems to be suggesting.

If you’re starting up an e-commerce website or would like to do so and need some advice, feel free to contact us for advice and a quote on how much it would cost to get your new e-commerce website or idea off the ground!

The PHP scope resolution operator in PHP is a useful feature when you need to access methods or variables within a static context. It can often be useful in reducing namespace conflicts. Especially when using custom code with off the shelf systems to avoid conflicting function redefinitions.

There have been a few cases where previously defined function errors have cropped up when adding a pre made system to a custom developed application. This is has been most prominent with Word press or any system which has generically named functions. It’s often unavoidable to prevent function clashes as it requires knowing any other external system definitions which of course isn’t always possible.

Keeping generic function names in a class is a possible option to reduce the problem; however this brings about the requirement of instantiating a class before being able to use the function. Another way to get around this issue is to use the scope resolution operator to statically call functions or even properties. In PHP this can be achieved using the scope resolution operator, otherwise known as the double colon operator.

Example:

class foobar {

public static function call_me() {}

}

Usage:

foobar::call_me();

The scope resolution operator should be used wisely. It is often best practice to only use static methods when they are stateless in nature, i.e. basic helper functions that do not modify any external state beyond their own contained execution.

A variety of Internet firms have stated that online video streaming records have been broken over the course of the UK’s recent royal wedding.

“The royal wedding has broken records for the biggest ever live streaming audience online, according to a internet firms.

…

The BBC website meanwhile wobbled under the strain this morning as huge numbers of Britons accessed its coverage.

Visitors were intermittently greeted with an error message saying the website was experiencing “abnormal traffic” around the climax of the ceremony after 11am.

A spokesman said: “We are experiencing some technical issues with BBC Online due to the sheer weight of traffic, which may cause the site to be slower than normal in some cases.”

Other major websites appeared to be cope with the royal wedding, an event that was widely expected to break traffic records.

YouTube’s live stream, which was expected to attract 400 million viewers, ran smoothly.

…

Akamai, a major traffic carrier, said that its own record of 1.6 million concurrent live streams during the World Cup was broken.

And Livestream, which provided online video for the Associated Press and CBS, also said the royal wedding was its most popular stream ever.

It is likely to take several days before a complete picture of how many watched the royal wedding online emerges, however.

Network upgrades by mobile operators along the royal wedding route were successful in ensuring that well-wishers were able to call, text, tweet and update Facebook.

O2 and Vodafone installed temporary network base stations around Hyde Park and St James’ Park to double capacity. A spokesman for O2 said it was braced for 65 million royal wedding pictures to be posted online from smartphones.”

The Telegraph

The inventor of the web has said that governments must act to preserve the principle of net neutrality.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the BBC that legislation may be needed if self-regulation failed.

He been asked by the UK government to negotiate an agreement on an open internet between service providers and content firms like the BBC and Skype.

Sir Tim would prefer self-regulation by the internet industry, but progress has been slow.

“If it fails the government has to be absolutely ready to legislate,” he said.

“It may be that the openness of the internet, we should just put into law.”

Net neutrality, the idea that all traffic on the internet should be treated equally, has been a controversial issue in the United States and is now moving up the political agenda in the UK.

Net neutrality is an important issue in Internet related politics. Without net neutrality, Internet service providers could offer packages in which certain online services, such as video streaming websites, e-commerce websites or certain web applications have increased priority over other web services.

The concept of net neutrality is such that all data traffic on the Internet is treating in an equal manner.  This is already becoming an issue in the case of Internet services providers which shape traffic of certain types. This is often done to curb data usage for high-use customers. However, when other traffic is prioritised and ISP to Internet/web company partnerships come into existence, this could mean that we see ‘packages’ of Internet access which allow faster access to certain websites while leaving other sites (who may not be able to partner with ISP financially) out in the cold.

Wait… hold on. Firstly, what are MyISAM and InnoDB?

MyISAM and InnoDB are the two commonly used MySQL engines for database tables. MyISAM is the default database engine for new tables created in MySQL 4 and 5.

So, why would I want to use one over the other?

Good question. Perhaps it is best answered by going through the differences between the two database engines.

1. InnoDB is a more modern database engine than MyISAM, so some could say MyISAM is more reliable due to this, although there is very little evidence to support this.
2. However! Even though InnoDB is newer, it has much better error recovery. Corrupt tables are (with all hope) quickly restored to a functional state when the  InnoDB engine is in use, however recovery of MyISAM powered tables is significantly slower and less reliable. Corrupt MyISAM tables have been known to hold up the starts and restarts of the MySQL daemon.
3. InnoDB supports foreign keys natively, meaning you can enforce referential integrity at a database level rather than ensuring integrity at the application level.
4. Insertions and updates in InnoDB utilise row level locking, whilst MyISAM only supports full table locking. This means that mass inserts and updates, MyISAM table access can become significantly slowed down as MySQL has to wait for the database engine to release the lock on the table caused by the insert or update. InnoDB defaults to locking only the rows which are affected by the insert or update query, meaning the rest of the table can still be accessed without waiting for a lock release.
5. MyISAM supports full-text indexing. This means MyISAM tables can have text fields indexed, which significantly increasing SELECT queries which contain text type fields. The InnoDB table has no support for full-text indexing.

It looks like there is no clear winner?

You’re right. Even though InnoDB is, as said, much more modern, both database engines still have their place in modern database structures. In fact, your choice should be dependant on how you anticipate the table will be used.

So, when would I want to use an InnoDB table?

If data integrity is important to you, multiple related InnoDB tables inherently take care of the data integrity between tables due to their support of foreign keys and enforcement of referencial integrity. Additionally, if your table will be used for intensive write operations (inserts and updates) the InnoDB engine can handle this much better than MyISAM, due to row level locking.

InnoDB does fall down however in the fact that it does utilise more memory than MyISAM and as previously mentioned it lacks full text indexing.

InnoDB sounds great. What need do I have for the MyISAM engine?

You don’t need to deal with referential integrity or building DBMS enforced relationships between tables with MyISAM, simply because the engine does not support it. One could argue this makes MyISAM tables quicker to create and useful for smaller, quicker tasks as well as initial system prototyping.

MyISAM also tends to be faster at many operations, especially large scale SELECT queries returned many results. For tables which will be used mainly for data retrieval with less in the way or inserts or updates, the performance of MyISAM may be a deciding factor. As well as this generalised speed, the MyISAM engine supports full-text indexing, which would be useful for large tables that contain textual data that needs to be fully searched and/or sorted on a regularly basis.

Okay. So, which would you suggest? Give me a quick summary.

InnoDB should be chosen where data is written reguarly and data integrity and security is critical.

MyISAM is the best choice for tables in which there is large amounts of data, especially textual data, that is read from significantly more than written to.

Thanks!

No problem.