On the Liip blog today Jean-Christophe Zulian shares an idea about gaining performance in your access controlled section of your application. He suggests preloading ACL information in Symfony2-based applications.

Symfony2 comes with an ACL mechanism that can help you whenever you need to add some permissions in your system. [...] Unfortunately we came across a situation where we had to do this kind of permission check on a very long list of items. [...] erformance will go bad (or very bad in our case) and as the system keep storing more and more of the same kind of data it become slower and slower. [...] Luckily for us Sf2 ACL system provides a way out of this. You can in a small amount of query load all the ACLs that are related to some given objects.

He includes a small snippet of code that takes in a set of blog posts (as an example) and calls a "findAcls" method to pre-fetch the information. That information is then available for the rest of the request. The fetch is done by packet instead of via one large query, making it a bit more performant.

In a new post to his blog Gonzalo Ayuso looks at the code required to populate a jQuery data grid with the records as pulled from a (MySQL) database.

Today I want to speak about populating datagrid techniques with PHP. At least in my daily work datagrids and tabular data are very common, because of that I want to show two different techniques when populating datagrids with data from our database. Maybe it's obvious, but I want to show the differences.

He uses "old school spaghetti code" rather than a framework to keep things simple and pulls the data from the database with a PDO connection. This information is then manually pushed into an HTML table and the data grid functionality is applied to it. The other method involves a little bit of JSON magic that the data grid library pulls in and populates for you, still appending rows to a table.

He notes that the second method seems faster to the user since the page and table are rendered first, but it also comes at the cost of more than one HTTP request.