Re: HipHop for PHP

Porterfield, Sean wrote:

From: Joe Pluta

Do any of you use Facebook regularly, especially the more involved
"apps"? Zynga puts out what are probably the most complex applications
(their Mafia Wars game is an example). They look very cool, but if you
follow them at all, you'll find that the reliability is absolutely
horrible. Whether it's serious bugs, bad versions of code rolled out,
loss of persistent data (that's a database crash to you and me) or just
plain crappy code, the environment is definitely not something I'd want
to install in my clients' production systems.

Now, we may be comparing apples and ostriches here - Zynga is a
semi-free game on a social networking site - but I also suspect it's at
least partly due to the architecture, and more importantly to an
infrastructure that wasn't designed to be an enterprise environment.

Just to clarify a point (because you're not wrong, but it's not clear based on your description) - Facebook applications like Zynga's games run on the application provider's server. Zynga has to manage their servers, their code, their data. Facebook provides the interfaces and passes some of the traffic back and forth. So when an app goes bad, it could be strictly the app programmer causing the problem, it could be Facebook changing an interface, it could be bandwidth or CPU overload anywhere along the way.

An interesting point, Sean. At the end of the day, however, it's a seriously deficient deployment environment. The number of bugs that we would consider fatal in an enterprise system is staggering. Simple case: a game event sends you a message and you can use it to get a bonus. You click on a link to "consume" the message and get the bonus. Only because of the fragility of the infrastructure, it's a common occurrence to click on the link and consume the message, only to see the game load incorrectly and not give you the bonus.

Can you imagine that in a production system? The infrastructure doesn't have even rudimentary two-phase commit. Definitely not the technique I'd use to build a multi-tiered architecture.

Joe