Better, Faster, Stronger PHP: Facebook Introduces HipHop Virtual Machine

Facebook is announcing a new execution engine for PHP in order to try to boost performance. Facebookintroduced HipHop for PHP nearly two years ago. Today the company announced a new tool in the HipHop toolbox, which it claims is 60% faster, with a 90% reduction in memory cost. Facebook engineer Jason Evans writes that the company put together a team last year to replace the HipHop interpreter (HPHPi). Today they’re taking the lid off of the new HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM) which will replace HPHPi and eventually be used in production. We’ve covered HipHop before, but in a nutshell, it is a tool to transform PHP into optimized C++ to help reduce CPU usage compared to using Apache and PHP. HPHPi is used during development, but can be very slow to run PHP.

What is HHVM?

According to Evans, HHVM is a “high-level stack-based virtual machine specifically tailored to PHP that executes HipHop bytecode (HHBC).” Evans says that HHVM is “approximately 1.6X faster for a set of real-world Facebook-specific benchmarks.” Facebook used HPHPi while developing, and uses the HipHop compiler (HPHPc) to compile binaries to run the Web site. In the long term, Evans says “we predict that hhvm will eventually outperform statically compiled binaries in Facebook’s production environment, in part because we are already sharing enough infrastructure with the static compiler that we will soon be able to leverage static analysis results during tracelet creation.” However, that’s a bit down the road. HHVM is still in the development stage and Evans says there’s “uncertainty regarding the translator’s behavior when running the entirety of Facebook’s PHP codebase.” But he says that the “first 90%” is done and “now we’re on to the second 90% as we make it really shine.”

HipHop is an Acquired Taste

Like its namesake, HipHop is not for everybody. It may have some significant drawbacks, depending on how you’re using it. Facebook’s environment is, if not unique, at least very unusual. Former Facebook developer Evan Priestley listed a number of downsides to HipHop on Quora in September. Some of Priestley’s complaints (such as using the HipHop interpreter when developing code) are answered with HHVM. But others, like behavioral differences between HipHop and PHP, are issues that developers and organizations considering HipHop need to be aware of. It’s generally acknowledged that HipHop is not for all applications. Priestley says that it may not provide any performance benefit if the application is not CPU bound. He also says that deployment and support is more complicated, and that diagnosing problems with HipHop is more complex because “you generally have to rule out application bugs first, then verify there is a PHP vs HPHP behavioral difference.” However, it seems to be working for Facebook and the new HHVM tool answers at least some complaints about earlier iterations. If you’re running a particularly hefty PHP-driven site, it might work for you too. The project ison GitHub. Evans says that HHVM is “deeply integrated” in the HipHop source code, so it should be there for interested developers to play with already.

Zend and RightScale Launch Open PHP Platform

RightScale and Zend Technologies launched a platform this morning for deploying and managing PHP applications.

The RightScale Zend PHP “Solution Pack” combines the RightScale Cloud Management Platform with the Zend PHP architecture powered by Zend Server. The service is another example of how platforms are becoming the most suitable method for developing, porting and maintaining applications in the cloud. “Considering PHP’s ubiquity on the web, it wasn’t a question of if it embraced the cloud, but when,” said Stephen O’Grady, Principal Analyst with RedMonk. “With the recently announced RightScale/Zend partnership, the two companies are offering PHP users the best of both worlds, with the time to market of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and the flexibility of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).”

The service includes the following:

Pre-configured Zend PHP architecture to speed time to market Autoscaling based on system and application load metrics, supported by load balancing PHP session clustering for high availability Redundant database with failover and recovery System, server and application-level monitoring, alerting and diagnostics Cloud portability What’s noteworthy about the news is the portability.A develoepr may use the service and port it to a cloud environment of their choosing.

The service from RightScale and Zend is a powerful combination in a market that is just emerging from services such as Windows Azure, Echolibre’s Orchestra and phpfog.

HTC Earnings Reveal New Foray Into Emerging Markets

HTC has been a brand known for trying to hit the top of the market. Its recent smartphone builds have had slicks designs, top specs and high price tags. The company has focused on consumers with above average incomes in developed markets like the United States and Western Europe. And has fallen flat.

Lukewarm Earnings

HTC knows it is in trouble. Its sales are stale and are expected to stay that way, if not worsen. It is facing stiff competition in the middle of the smartphone market from the likes of Nokia and BlackBerry along with a plethora of Asian manufacturers such as LG, Huawei and ZTE. Something needs to give. As such, HTC said today that it would begin producing lower-end smartphones and focus on emerging markets, especially China, according to Reuters.

HTC announced today that its revenue from Q4 2012 was $2.03 billion ($60 billion New Taiwan dollars). That is down from $2.37 billion (NT$70.2 billion) in Q3 2012. HTC CEO Peter Chou said he expects the results from the first quarter of 2013 to be even worse. Hence, the need to expand its product to different price structures targeted at a different market.

Having Trouble Competing? Find A New Market

It is not a surprising development. If a company runs out of room to grow in one market, the best thing to do is find another where it can. The U.S has proven itself to be Apple/Samsung centric, a reality that has hit the rest of the smartphone manufacturer industry hard (see the U.S. struggles of Nokia, Motorola, LG and BlackBerry). HTC has a variety of quality devices available in the U.S., including the One X+, Droid DNA for Android and 8X Windows Phone. Anybody looking for quality smartphones could do a lot worse than acquiring an HTC device.

You can peel away HTC’s problems like so many layers of an onion. Foremost, its brand strength lags behind that of Apple and Samsung. That means that even when HTC comes out with a top quality device, it lacks the excitement and anticipation reserved for new iPhones or Samsung Galaxies. As we have seen with the iPhone, that type of hype and consumer anticipation is very important to a smartphone maker’s bottom line.

HTC also has a logistical distribution problem, especially in the U.S., where its top devices are tied into exclusivity agreements with carriers like Sprint (Evo 4G LTE), One X+ (AT&T) and Verizon (Droid DNA). As we have seen, exclusivity agreements tend to be poor bets for manufacturers looking to make dents in the market. HTC’s declining revenues make it difficult to remedy either of those situations.

HTC’s declining revenue then makes its decision to focus on emerging markets easy to understand. If it cannot keep up with the big boys in the big market, try to make a dent with limited resources in nascent markets. It will still face stiff competition in the likes of China and India, but at least in those regions it can stretch its dollars further than it could in the U.S.

HTC’s new direction does not necessarily mean it will skip the top smartphone markets. The manufacturer is expected to announce its new “M7″ Android smartphone at launch events in New York and London later this month.

Enterprise Flash Storage: It’s About More Than Just Speed

Virtualization and flash memory are disrupting the staid storage industry. First embraced in slick consumer products like the iPod, flash memory is now the new darling of enterprise IT. One reason is speed. Flash is more than 400 times faster than rotating disks.

The other reasons are virtualization and cloud computing. Combined, these technology trends have strained the capabilities of traditional storage products. Those big metal boxes of enterprise storage, called arrays, were originally designed in the 1980s – before MC Hammer rocked parachute pants. Today’s input/output storage requirements are heavier and far more random than storage designers could have predicted 30 years ago. And with new technology comes new problems. IT systems that once hummed, “Can’t Touch This,” became hung up by traffic jams. With the highly random I/O of modern virtualization, flash trumps even the best spinning disks.

Well, nothing gets venture capitalists writing checks faster than IT managers with large budgets wringing their hands in frustration. So, enter the flash solutions from enterprise storage startups. Even the incumbent dinosaurs are showing some hustle. Just last spring, storage industry giant EMC‘s dropped an impressive $400 million to snap up XtremIO, a three-year-old flash company that has yet to ring up a single sale.

Too Much Flash?

So has flash been over-hyped? Yes, of course it has. Most promising new technologies are overhyped, but the best survive the disappointment that is sure to follow. The problem with most of the flash crowd is that they tout it as a cure-all for IT’s performance woes – like a magic medicine show, it puts the performance back in your data center. But it’s not magic. It does one thing really well – it eliminates contention for disk spindles. But flash by itself does nothing to ease storage management burdens, and in fact may actually contribute to increased infrastructure complexity.

Like all new technologies, flash-based storage systems need to be designed into complete solutions rather than just point products.

Speed Isn’t Enough

Today, flash is central to nearly every next-generation storage solution coming to market. But smart IT managers know that speed alone doesn’t solve all of their storage problems, especially in a world of virtualization and cloud computing. In fact, flash-based vendors that offer systems that simplify storage management provide a much greater boost to IT performance than just making I/Os go faster.

Like many incremental improvements in component technologies – even order of magnitude performance boosts like flash – are too often hijacked by legacy vendors to create incrementally smaller and faster versions of the same old products. Don’t be blinded by flash. It’s cool, but it needs to be integrated with new approaches to building complete solutions.

Expect the enterprise storage conversation, pushed by the new demands of virtualization and cloud computing, to move beyond flash. It’s not just about the speed; it’s about the solution.

Software as a Service Platform

Software as a service Platform also known as SaaS Platform is a web model of software consumption.

With On Demand SaaS Platform, or Software as a service Platform, a provider licenses an app to customers for use as a service on demand, either through a time subscription or pay by usage.

The software as a service Platform model allows vendors to develop, host and operate software for customer use. Software as a service Platform means that alternative too having to purchase the hardware / software to run an application, clientele only require a computer or a server to download the app and internet access and utilise the software. SaaS Platform (Software as a service Platform) allows the software to be licensed for either a single user or for a whole group of users.

SaaS Platform (Software as a service Platform), software vendors could host the app on their own web servers or upload the app to the consumer device, disabling it after use or after the on-demand contract expires.

While software as a service Platform (SaaS Platform) was generally deployed initially for sales force automation and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - its use has now become widespread by organisations for tasks such as computerised HR, invoicing, service desk management, and many more..

Why Legislating App Rights Is Harder Than It Seems

Major regulation is pending that could change the future of the mobile ecosystem and the way mobile apps are made, played and paid for. And it’s not all good.

The Problem With App Rights

Two weeks ago, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) released the APPS Rights Act, a bill pushing developers to implement self-regulatory practices that would improve the security and transparency of user data in mobile apps. “This bill would require that app developers maintain privacy policies, obtain consent from consumers before collecting data, and securely maintain the data that they collect,” Johnson’s office writes online. There’s not question that changes are needed. Mobile users must be able to make their information isn’t transmitted and sold to third-party vendors. But like similar regulatory efforts, including the recent do-not-track mobile privacy guidelines laid out by the Federal Trade Commission last Friday, and last month’s recommendations to the mobile industryfrom California Attorney General Kamala Harris, there’s both good and bad aspects to the specific approach taken by the APPS Rights Act. And unfortunately, there’s plenty of bad.

One problem with these guides is that they are penned by people outside of the industry — often in the dark about the best ways to reach their laudable goals. Harris’ recommendation and the FTC’s suggestions comprised a slew of unenforceable recommendations. The APPS bill, meanwhile, would become a mandate if adopted. A mandate likely to lead to unintended consequences to the mobile marketplace.

Developers Are Worried

Security expert Dan Kaminsky says the slow, muddled, legislative process can create frameworks bearing “no resemblance to the problems that need to be solved.” Kaminsky thinks this could lead to applications having to show users exactly what they’re doing in a hardware add-on – akin to web cams having a light that goes on insuring people are aware of exactly what they’re doing.

“What I fear is you won’t be able to write code without having to consult a lawyer,” he says. And if that happens, Kaminsky adds, developers are likely move away from making mobile apps and return building websites.

Beyond subjecting users to long, complex terms-of-use agreements, the doesn’t do a good specifying what happens to collected data beyond the third parties, says Joe Santilli, the chief executive of the mobile app certification service SafeApp. This gray area is known as data retention.

“It really doesn’t make any provisions whatsoever for how third parties are going to share the data with so-called fourth or fifth parties,” Santilli explains. “For example, a marketing partner of an ad network. These people are going to share the data that they cull from these apps… to fourth and fifth parties.”

No one knows the length of time personal data will be stored, the rights of users and the process by which they exercise their rights when dealing with third and fourth parties. The APPS bill’s withdrawal of consent form is a weak attempt at stemmin the data flow. The Opt Out of App Use function requires developers to delete all data if a user opts out. But that doesn’t address the issue of fourth and fifth parties that may already have the data in question:

“By the time the app developer has seen this request from the user, this data has already been shared by the third party (to) the marketing partners, the ad networks, the ad analytics partners,” Santilli says. “At this point you can’t really put the genie back in the bottle, can you?”

At the same time, having to meet these requirements could kill the drive of young entrepreneurs, says developer Jad Meouchy. ”This act will end up creating a barrier for new startups… by doubling development time and creating data management headaches,” he predicts. “When you’re an indie developer, there are simply not enough resources to address this kind of compliance.”

Real-World Example

Benjamin Goering, the technical product manager at Livefyre Labs, manages more than 10 million comment threads and personal user accounts for customers. When those customers upgrade from freemium accounts to enterprise versions, they want their user data and accounts migrated. But if those people have not authorized that data to be shared, Livefyre can’t make the transition for them.

But rather than stifle innovation, Goering worries that users won’t take the rules seriously if they don’t work. ”It may be completely ignored if it’s out of touch,” Goering said. “If it’s well legislated, it may be useful to have a framework for safe harbor” where developer can be confident they won’t get sued

His team faced that issue when working on a Super Bowl product that aggregates tweets and Instagram photos. This raises the question of whether or not users know shared content is ripe for the plucking. Livefyre bet that users know their shared content may be re-used, and decided not to worry about legal red tape.

Goering warns that if developers have to wait for lawmakers to resolve everything, “it would be impossible to make week-long projects.”

“The nature of the Web is you’re requesting a document and receiving it – at some level data is being taken,” he says. “Where do you draw that line?”