On the Qandidate.com blog there's a new post looking at fault tolerant programming in PHP, a follow up to their previous post introducing the topic and creating a "circuit breaker" to prevent major issues when a problem pops up.

Now we will show you a running demo of the application where the circuit breaker library Phystrix is combined with asynchronous programming. The advantage of this approach is that it allows the querying of multiple backend services asynchronously. A timeout can be set for each of the calls and the circuit breaker will deal with failing services.

A screencast included in the post shows a script in action and how it reacts when the various services it needs fail. They've posted the code for the demo can be found over on GitHub and full instructions to run it are included in the post. Also included is some of the output from the test and a peek inside the logs showing where things were broken and if they were able to recover.

The Qandidate.com blog has a new post today looking at fault tolerant programming in PHP applications. Essentially, this means writing your code so that error conditions are handled gracefully and with as little impact as possible.

In your application, every time you call an "external" service you are vulnerable to the failure in that service. That either might be a third party API being down, your database being unresponsive or unexpected errors from the 3rd party library you are using. With many developers and companies being interested in composing applications out of microservices at the moment, guarding for failures because of broken dependencies gets even more important.

They describe a situation where data is coming from an external source (an inventory service) and a timeout or connection failure occurs. They propose a sort of "circuit breaker" to be put in place to protect the application, fail fast on error and maybe even retry until the request is successful. They also point out a library from oDesk, Phystrix, that allows for fault tolerant execution through a wrapper that traps errors and deals with them instead of just breaking. This is the first part of a series, so in part two they'll show the library in use along with the React HTTP client.

In a new post today, Mike Naberezny talks about some updates that have been made to the XML-RPC client included with the Zend Framework, spotlighting three items in particular.

A few weeks ago, I rewrote the Zend XML-RPC client as part of a customer project at Maintainable. After fixing a fair number of bugs and writing a test suite, I made some enhancements and usability improvements. You can learn more about the new XML-RPC client from its documentation.

The three new updates to the package deal with:

• Calling remote methods (a new call() method)
• Server proxy objects have been added
• Faults are thrown as PHP exceptions

In a new post today, Mike Naberezny talks about some updates that have been made to the XML-RPC client included with the Zend Framework, spotlighting three items in particular.

A few weeks ago, I rewrote the Zend XML-RPC client as part of a customer project at Maintainable. After fixing a fair number of bugs and writing a test suite, I made some enhancements and usability improvements. You can learn more about the new XML-RPC client from its documentation.

The three new updates to the package deal with:

• Calling remote methods (a new call() method)
• Server proxy objects have been added
• Faults are thrown as PHP exceptions