Date: Wed, 07 Jun 2000 13:11:34 -0700
From: "Sara L. Killingsworth" <saralk@home.com>
To: SaraLK@Home.Com
Subject: PHP Update and Case Study

PHP Server-Side Scripting Language Update-June

* There are now more than two million PHP sites.
* PHP remains the most popular module for Apache servers, with a greater
than 30 percent share of all Apache servers running PHP.
* Since May 22, when the final release of PHP 4.0 occurred, tens of
thousands of users have downloaded PHP 4.0, which is driven by the Zend
Engine.

Because some of you have asked how PHP is used, Zend will send a series
of application case studies to you over the next few months. The case
study for this month relates how Lycos used PHP in its MP3 application
and why. Should you be interested in an expanded article or an exclusive
case study article, please contact me. Case Study # 1 is below.

Have a great Summer!
Best,
Sara Killingsworth
Zend Technologies USA
V: 1-480-961-1515
F:   1-480-961-2126
SaraLK@Zend.Com

ZEND PHP CASE STUDY # 1

Case Study: Lycos MP3 Site Running PHP

To get a comprehensive web search of MP3 files, visit
http://mp3.lycos.com. This site, powered by PHP, is a large commercial
site providing downloads of music on MP3, download of an MP3 player,
message boards, chat rooms, and full web FTP searches of various media
types. MP3 currently displays up to 1.4 million-page views daily (that
is, the number of ads served), and is expected to reach as many as two
million per day.

We spoke to the site’s developer, Stig Bakken of FAST
(http://www.fast.no). The basic considerations for selecting a
development environment for the site were the Lycos specifications, ease
of development, and ease of maintenance. In fact, for maintenance
reasons, parts of the site, which were originally developed in Perl, are
now being ported to PHP. According to Bakken, the work involved in the
conversion is justified, considering the great savings in time and money
for maintaining a much simpler PHP script to perform the same functions.

On the MP3.lycos site, PHP performs a number of tasks.
* The common layout elements of the pages are stored in a PHP library.
This allows separation of the content and the style information,
contributing consistency to the site and allowing the site’s data to be
stored in database tools more suited to content storage and retrieval.
* Advertisements are fetched from an ad server using PHP. The site uses
an HTTP-based protocol specified by Lycos to communicate with the
separate ad-serving process.
* A customized PHP extension is used to communicate with the search
engine and to send the results to the server for displaying in the
specified format.
* Content is retrieved from a MySQL database using PHP. The PHP script
allows for maintenance and update of the database content.
* The PHP code enables maintenance of dataset information, the list of
indexed sites, stored in a MySQL database.

The site accesses a small MySQL database used for content and site
maintenance. The data search is done with an FTP search engine, which
indexes more than a million files. Communication with the search engine
is done using an UDP-based protocol, prospero. Communication with the
prosper client is implemented as a separate extension to PHP 4.0. MP3
search began as a hybrid of Apache/PHP, mod_rewrite and a custom web
server (ftpsearch-gateway). Since then, FAST has been moving toward
making it a pure PHP site. The last porting to PHP is of the FTP search,
which is expected to be complete by January 2000.

Bakken cites the following reasons for using PHP as the coding language
behind the site:
* Quick development time. The first version of mp3.lycos.com was
developed in approximately two weeks.
* Simplified code maintenance. Because PHP is designed for dynamic web
site design, implementing PHP solutions means fewer lines of code, as
well as code which is easier to read.
* Very good compatibility with Apache servers, the most common Internet
server used today.
* Flexibility in porting to other servers. FAST is interested in trying
out Zeus when it becomes viable, and the PHP code requires no adaptation
to make the change to another servers.

In addition to these benefits, Bakken cites several major improvements
that PHP 4.0 added to the previous PHP 3.0 technology. The major
benefits are in the areas of speed and flexibility. PHP 4.0 makes it
simple to build your own dynamically loadable extensions, says Bakken,
which simplifies the maintenance of the site. PHP 4.0 is now in
pre-release and is freely available.

Bakken is also running an alpha release of the Zend technology,
ZendCache, set for release in mid-2000. For the Lycos site, which has
more than 500 Apache processes running simultaneously, ZendCache
provides huge savings in CPU use.
The site has a five-star reliability rating for MP3 server availability.
This is the highest rating available; meaning that there is a very high
probability of the user’s being able to download the file. The Lycos
Richmedia search allows visitors to search for images, video, streams
and sounds using the FAST Search technology, the same as used for
Alltheweb.com, one of the fastest search engines on the Internet. FTP
Search and MP3 Search use the FTP Search technology. The FTP site is
currently being ported to PHP coding rather than the custom solution
previously implemented.