I’ve been working on this bplustree library for the whole last month; I have to confess I’ve got scared more than a few times, and I was going to fear I couldn’t make it to the end; finally, looks like it’s almost there. Now I only have a talk with my tutor to ask a few things.

Image does not exist: images/php-programming.jpg

Aside: despite all of my best intentions, although I’ve put all of my efforts to make it hopefully backward compatible, this library has been only tested under PHP5, and I can’t assure it will work with PHP4 as well (if at all).

By the way, let’s go straight to the subject of this post, which is meant as a little compendium about PHP performances and issues about arrays.

In PHP there’s no formal distinction between integer-indexed arrays and associative arrays, which are indexed using a string.

$arr = array();
$arr[0] = 42;

works as fine as

$arr = array();
$arr[’answer-to-life-universe-and-all’] = ’fourty-two’;

The bplustree library I’ve been working on is essentially a port of a python library (bplustree.py by Aaron Watters) I’ve read about on a paper about genome indexing in bio-informatics. As it sounded well tested enough I’ve finally decided to base on that my PHP class.

Python and PHP are of course two fairly different languages.

In PHP we have several functions and ways to deal with arrays; in this post I’ll list some and write a little summary about performance comparisons and “oddities” using what I’ve found on the net, and what I think I’ve found out myself.

Maybe nothing new, but useful as a remind for myself, and maybe for some of you :)

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Image does not exist: images/nowhere-strikes-back.jpg

I’m taking a rest for a while, I’ll be back in the end of August; meanwhile I’ll be working finally on the new indexing system which will hopefully make FP more reliable (and I hope even a little bit faster in the long run) :)

No multi-user for now: sorry guys, the indexing thingie should be very hard already, but don’t worry it is still planned.

So, I hope you’ll take a little rest too.

Oh, user approval in this period will be disabled on the forum, so new users will be able to register and beg^H^H^Hask for help right away.

This also means do not ever ever ever try and contact me by mail, by contact form, comments to this post or by phone (how did you…??) for help, support requests or selling me vacuums or otherwise die in a fire :D (pic related)

For all of this use the forums :p

See you soon.

Depending on how many of you are still needing PHP4, I will consider different solutions for the new features (mostly optimized indexing and such).

I’m developing under apache+PHP5 but I always care about being compatible with PHP4.

As you might know, however, support for PHP4 has been dropped in February; so how is the situation of your web hosts? Would you still use FP if I chose a PHP5-only feature for future development?

Let me know. You can discuss on the forum, too.

Bye

I’m getting a lot of these refererrer urls lately

http://www.undergrou … viewtopic.php?t=3218

and I’m quite a bit worried about what this site should be…

I suggest you to back up your blog, who knows..

If anybody knows something, please let me know, in this case also via contact form

To the guys running the site, thank you for spending your time trying to hack into a spare time project created for fun and which the author freely shared with other people and for free.

I’m sure a someone of you is going to be rewarded if he’ll find an exploit.

Thank you a lot for spoiling our fun.

It’s been a damn long, guys!

Image does not exist: images/logo-vivace.png

(horrible home-made artwork by me, as always :P)

Finally, here it is, with its huge, but probably not even complete CHANGELOG!

Download from SourceForge

WARNING: Please BACKUP before upgrading, and I suggest you to follow this guide

If you’re still unsure, check this early gallery of screenshots by drudo, which is a bit outdated, but should still give you an idea :)

(For those of you wondering, it’s svn rev146)

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