Pre-sales: Angie, Performance, Documentation, SVN!
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I have a few questions which will influence my purchase decision:
1. Is the Angie PHP MVC framework made available to customers? (in an extracted form as it is here: http://code.activecollab.com/svn/ac/angie/)
2. Is there any documentation (for Angie) lying around somewhere? Even something used internally would be good!
3. Ilija has said in the past that activeCollab & Angie have poor performance. What is the development team doing to improve activeCollab's performance?
4. When is documentation for writing plugins, modules and interfacing with the internal API going to be released?
5. Do customers have access to an activeCollab SVN for downloading bleeding-edge updates?
Thank you!
Michael
1. Is the Angie PHP MVC framework made available to customers? (in an extracted form as it is here: http://code.activecollab.com/svn/ac/angie/)
2. Is there any documentation (for Angie) lying around somewhere? Even something used internally would be good!
3. Ilija has said in the past that activeCollab & Angie have poor performance. What is the development team doing to improve activeCollab's performance?
4. When is documentation for writing plugins, modules and interfacing with the internal API going to be released?
5. Do customers have access to an activeCollab SVN for downloading bleeding-edge updates?
Thank you!
Michael
Staff
Ilija Studen
on Jun 14. 2008. 12:31 pm
Hi Michael,
1. Angie is not available as separate library. Currently it is available only as part of activeCollab and cannot be used in any other way except that.
While proven in production environment we do not have time and resources to push it as stand alone product.
2. Yes, inside of the framework itself. It can be extracted using phpDocumentor or similar tool. Thanks to the fact that everything in the code is documented good IDE-s like Zend Studio can help a lot with inline documentation and code completion. We use these features a lot and pay close attention that parameters and return values are well documented and up to date.
3. activeCollab is big and highly flexible script that does a lot of things dynamically. Modular architecture and the fact that we need to support PHP4 at the moment come with a price. What activeCollab does to improve performance is aggressive caching of operation that take a lot of time to be executed (building permission filters for example). We continue working on the system itself - removing events that are not used, working on more ways to cache the data, speeding up internal operations, moving data from heavily used tables into separate ones that are loaded only when needed etc.
Performance can be improved even more if you enable opcode and query caches on your server. Also, choosing the right hosting provider and plan is as essential as caching. If you know that you'll have a lot of active projects, data and users in the system don't go with shared hosting but use at least VPS plans with guaranteed resources where you can run only things you need.
4. I just started writing a series of blog post that describe activeCollab modules in details (first post is Anatomy of activeCollab Modules). It will take me some time to write everything, but now that activeCollab 1.1 branch is stable and that most customers already upgraded I can focus more on that.
5. No, we do not offer access to the code repository to anyone outside our company.
1. Angie is not available as separate library. Currently it is available only as part of activeCollab and cannot be used in any other way except that.
While proven in production environment we do not have time and resources to push it as stand alone product.
2. Yes, inside of the framework itself. It can be extracted using phpDocumentor or similar tool. Thanks to the fact that everything in the code is documented good IDE-s like Zend Studio can help a lot with inline documentation and code completion. We use these features a lot and pay close attention that parameters and return values are well documented and up to date.
3. activeCollab is big and highly flexible script that does a lot of things dynamically. Modular architecture and the fact that we need to support PHP4 at the moment come with a price. What activeCollab does to improve performance is aggressive caching of operation that take a lot of time to be executed (building permission filters for example). We continue working on the system itself - removing events that are not used, working on more ways to cache the data, speeding up internal operations, moving data from heavily used tables into separate ones that are loaded only when needed etc.
Performance can be improved even more if you enable opcode and query caches on your server. Also, choosing the right hosting provider and plan is as essential as caching. If you know that you'll have a lot of active projects, data and users in the system don't go with shared hosting but use at least VPS plans with guaranteed resources where you can run only things you need.
4. I just started writing a series of blog post that describe activeCollab modules in details (first post is Anatomy of activeCollab Modules). It will take me some time to write everything, but now that activeCollab 1.1 branch is stable and that most customers already upgraded I can focus more on that.
5. No, we do not offer access to the code repository to anyone outside our company.
activeCollab Team Member
Thank you for your detailed explanation!
It's good to hear you are constantly striving to improve performance. I hope you will continue to do so as I will be purchasing in the very near future!
Can you explain this?
Why is that? PHP 4 is dead!
It's good to hear you are constantly striving to improve performance. I hope you will continue to do so as I will be purchasing in the very near future!
Can you explain this?
Ilija Studen:we need to support PHP4 at the moment
Why is that? PHP 4 is dead!
Staff
Ilija Studen
on Jun 14. 2008. 2:15 pm
michael.a:Why is that? PHP 4 is dead!
While many hosts upgraded to PHP5, PHP4 is far from being dead. It is still pretty common and many of our customers use it.
activeCollab Team Member
PHP4 security patches will no longer be provided after August. If that doesn't make it dead, I don't know what does.
To what extent are InnoDB-specific queries used in activeCollab?
Does activeCollab use transactions?
Why is InnoDB the preferred database engine?
Why is 64mb PHP memory limit required?
To what extent are InnoDB-specific queries used in activeCollab?
Does activeCollab use transactions?
Why is InnoDB the preferred database engine?
Why is 64mb PHP memory limit required?
Staff
Ilija Studen
on Jun 24. 2008. 12:59 pm
As long as PHP4 is widely used it is not dead. Support for it will die off and people will migrate to PHP5, that is inevitable, but until good part of our customer base is still using it PHP4 is not dead to us.
activeCollab uses transactions if available. When you run installer it will check if you have InnoDB support and make proper changes. Thanks to this activeCollab works on both transactional and non-transactional storage engines. InnoDB is preferred because of its performance and transaction support.
64MB is required if you upload large images and want thumbnails created for them. GD can consume a lot of memory when resizing images, especially larger ones. You can learn more about the whole process and how it can be configured here: Problems with memory and thumbnail creation.
activeCollab itself usually consumes between 4 and 8MB depending on amount of data is it handling for a particular request.
activeCollab uses transactions if available. When you run installer it will check if you have InnoDB support and make proper changes. Thanks to this activeCollab works on both transactional and non-transactional storage engines. InnoDB is preferred because of its performance and transaction support.
64MB is required if you upload large images and want thumbnails created for them. GD can consume a lot of memory when resizing images, especially larger ones. You can learn more about the whole process and how it can be configured here: Problems with memory and thumbnail creation.
activeCollab itself usually consumes between 4 and 8MB depending on amount of data is it handling for a particular request.
activeCollab Team Member
