On April 14+15 the Open Web Vancouver 2008 conference will showcase open web technologies, communities and culture, and evangelize the Open Web to developers, designers, organizers and the community at large.
What’s the Open Web? We have invited Brian Shire (Facebook’s PHP Internals Tech Lead) – who will talk about ‘Inside Alternative PHP Cache (APC) – Serving Millions of Facebookers’ at the Open Web Vancouver 2008 conference – for some insight.
Q: What’s the Open Web?
Brian Shire: The term “Open Web” represents the technology, people, organizations, and corporations that go beyond simple producer and consumer economics. This community revolves around the idea that many technologies can better grow and serve people if the source or accessibility is made available to everyone. This includes a number of open source technologies such as PHP, Apache, and MySQL (to name but a few), but as we witness more web based technologies emerge this extends into open standards, developer API’s, and greater user involvement.
Q: Why does the Open Web (Open Source, PHP, etc.) matter?
Brian Shire: The Open Web is important not only because it serves as the core for many web technologies, but because it’s part of technological growth. Important technology is often ubiquitous technology, and I believe we see this with products of the Open Web. From Apache and PHP stacks, to web standards, to the availability of things like 3rd-party Facebook apps we see the common trend of standardization and openness in order to take leaps in new technology. This often comes with the responsibility of mitigating risks like security, privacy, and a mutual respect of all the interests involved in the community.
Q: Tell us more about the Open Web and your ‘Inside Alternative PHP Cache (APC) – Serving Millions of Facebookers’ talk at Open Web Vancouver 2008.
Brian Shire: I’m excited to get an opportunity to speak at Open Web Vancouver 2008 about our work with existing open technologies, specifically Alternative PHP Cache (APC) and PHP. I’ll discuss how APC and PHP work together and some of the details that may not be apparent at first glance when scaling with APC. I’ll also go into some Facebook specific details and changes that we’ve contributed and some of our current work to handle growing performance requirements. APC serves as a good example of core technology being leveraged an maintained jointly by Facebook and the community. Facebook has been very supportive of contributing to existing technologies, releasing internal technologies for broader use, and making new tools available to application developers. We maintain a mirror of several projects as well as a our internally developed tools in the hopes of further spurring growth. Because of the existence of these tools and the ability to work directly with others on them, Facebook has been able to make advances in our developer API which has created a whole community of application developers and users. This is something that everyone gains from and is part of what an Open Web is about.
Thanks Brian Shire for your time and insight. Join us for Vancouver’s 1st Open Web Conference at Canada Place or/and tell us “What’s the Open Web and Why It Matters” and win a free two-day Open Web Vancouver 2008 conference pass.
About Brian Shire:
Brian Shire is Facebook’s technical lead for PHP internals and a developer for the Alternative PHP Cache (APC). Facebook is an amazingly popular social network of which Brian has been a part of for over the last two years focusing on performance and scalability. Other interests include embedded software, learning Japanese, and sailing.
Questions? Comments? Send them along to the Vancouver Ajax & Web 2.0 (3.0) Developer Forum/Mailing List. Thanks!
