#open source serverless computing platforms

In the dynamic world of web development, PHP has emerged as a true cornerstone, shaping the digital landscape over the years. As an open-source, server-side scripting language, PHP has played a pivotal role in enabling developers to create interactive and dynamic websites. Let's take a journey through time to explore how PHP has left an indelible mark on web development.

1. The Birth of PHP (1994)

PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) came into being in 1994, thanks to Rasmus Lerdorf. Initially, it was a simple set of Common Gateway Interface (CGI) binaries used for tracking visits to his online resume. However, Lerdorf soon recognized its potential for web development, and PHP evolved into a full-fledged scripting language.

2. PHP's Role in the Dynamic Web (Late '90s to Early 2000s)

In the late '90s and early 2000s, PHP began to gain prominence due to its ability to generate dynamic web content. Unlike static HTML, PHP allowed developers to create web pages that could interact with databases, process forms, and provide personalized content to users. This shift towards dynamic websites revolutionized the web development landscape.

3. The Rise of PHP Frameworks (2000s)

As PHP continued to grow in popularity, developers sought ways to streamline and standardize their development processes. This led to the emergence of PHP frameworks like Laravel, Symfony, and CodeIgniter. These frameworks provided structured, reusable code and a wide range of pre-built functionalities, significantly accelerating the development of web applications.

4. PHP and Content Management Systems (CMS) (Early 2000s)

Content Management Systems, such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, rely heavily on PHP. These systems allow users to create and manage websites with ease. PHP's flexibility and extensibility make it the backbone of numerous plugins, themes, and customization options for CMS platforms.

5. E-Commerce and PHP (2000s to Present)

PHP has played a pivotal role in the growth of e-commerce. Platforms like Magento, WooCommerce (built on top of WordPress), and OpenCart are powered by PHP. These platforms provide robust solutions for online retailers, allowing them to create and manage online stores efficiently.

6. PHP's Contribution to Server-Side Scripting (Throughout)

PHP is renowned for its server-side scripting capabilities. It allows web servers to process requests and deliver dynamic content to users' browsers. This server-side scripting is essential for applications that require user authentication, data processing, and real-time interactions.

7. PHP's Ongoing Evolution (Throughout)

PHP has not rested on its laurels. It continues to evolve with each new version, introducing enhanced features, better performance, and improved security. PHP 7, for instance, brought significant speed improvements and reduced memory consumption, making it more efficient and appealing to developers.

8. PHP in the Modern Web (Present)

Today, PHP remains a key player in the web development landscape. It is the foundation of countless websites, applications, and systems. From popular social media platforms to e-commerce giants, PHP continues to power a significant portion of the internet.

9. The PHP Community (Throughout)

One of PHP's strengths is its vibrant and active community. Developers worldwide contribute to its growth by creating libraries, extensions, and documentation. The PHP community fosters knowledge sharing, making it easier for developers to learn and improve their skills.

10. The Future of PHP (Ongoing)

As web technologies continue to evolve, PHP adapts to meet new challenges. Its role in serverless computing, microservices architecture, and cloud-native applications is steadily increasing. The future holds exciting possibilities for PHP in the ever-evolving web development landscape.

In conclusion, PHP's historical journey is interwoven with the evolution of web development itself. From its humble beginnings to its current status as a web development powerhouse, PHP has not only shaped but also continues to influence the internet as we know it. Its versatility, community support, and ongoing evolution ensure that PHP will remain a vital force in web development for years to come.

Lupine Publsihers | Computer Science Research Journals

Abstract

As a very import part of the Internet of Things (IoT), smart buildings usually consist of wireless sensor network (WSN) and many radio-frequency identification devices for data collection instantly. This paper presents a real time data collection and visualization scheme for smart buildings. We propose a framework that uses both open source hardware and software to collect the event driven data from a WSN and subsequently convert them to the query-based data which is needed by cloud server. Experiment results demonstrated that the proposed framework is feasible for efficiently visualizing data locally and preparing query-based data for cloud storage server.

Keywords: Wireless Sensor Network; Iot; Data Visualization; Smart Building

Introduction

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a very important part of the Internet of Things (IoT) [1]. It is composed of several thousands of sensor nodes which are capable of sensing, actuating and relaying the collected information [2-4]. The primary function of WSN is to obtain information from sensors and monitor environments. In recent years, many WSN applications have been developed. Particularly, in smart home or smart building applications [5], all sensors connected to WSN will collect data and subsequently forward them to a central device referred as WSN hub or gateway. These data could be saved locally and finally uploaded on cloud storage server like Blink or Arlo home security system. In general, the cloud storage server is the center of smart home or smart building. As a result, users need access these data anytime or anywhere from their smart phone or other mobile devices. Hence, all the smart building related management applications could be considered as cloud based IoT systems [6-7].

With the data collected on a WSN in real time, users can employ a smart building management application to visualizing these data in a local machine or upload these data on the cloud for a broad management purpose. Because there are many different protocols exist on IoT, one of the biggest challenges for general management applications is the interoperability. That is, the devices on IoT working on different protocols cannot communicate and exchange data compatibly. Most importantly, the products with the same protocols are not even always interoperable across different profiles [7]. Moreover, the data collected from WSN sensors are the event-based raw data. Those data must be subsequently converted to a query-based format for an efficient usage by different protocols with difference devices. Meanwhile, all those data should be stored persistently in the cloud server at multiple levels. Later, they could be easily combined and processed with previously stored data, as well as with other non-IoT data [8]. Thus, in this paper, we propose a cross-platform system to visualize WSN data and convert the event-based data to a query-based format for the cloud storage server. This paper is organized as follows: section 2 described the proposed structure of WSN. Experiment results are shown in section 3. Section 4 draws the conclusion and future work.

Structure of WSN

One of the most popular WSN protocols is ZigBee [9]. A typical ZigBee based wireless sensor network is shown in Figure 1. The XBee module is an implementation of ZigBee standard from Digi International Inc. [www.digi.com]. There are three parts in XBee/ ZigBee mesh network: coordinator (red dot), router (blue dot) and end node (green dot) [10]. All the data collected by end nodes will be forwarded to coordinator via routers in the WSN and processed by a local computer directly connected with that coordinator. In our work, we adopted XBee/ZigBee based WSN for the data collection. In XBee/ZigBee based WSN, one XBee module is configured as coordinator and there are many other XBee modules are configured as routers that could be connected to sensors [11]. A temperature sensor is attached on end node (green dot) in our system as demonstrated in Figure 1. An XBee wireless node is actually a microcontroller with a wireless radio transceiver. XBee provides both analog port and digital port based on its configuration. The detailed XBee configuration could be found in Faludi’s work [10]. Figure 2 shows the circuits on a breadboard, prototype board, and print circuit board of a wireless sensor node in our experiment.

Figure 1: A typical ZigBee based wireless sensor network.

Figure 2: Circuit boards of a wireless sensor node.

Experiment Results

Figure 3: XBee based WSN real-time data visualization in a smart building.

In a smart building scenario, we mount the wireless sensors in different locations in a building. The sensors will collect temperature, transmit these data in real time, and forward those data to an XBee coordinator which is connected with a computer. In Figure 3, we demonstrated our experiment result created by an open source programming language named “processing” [12]. The temperature data are displayed based on their locations in the building with red dots representing the XBee wireless sensor nodes. We also can animate the temperature data and blink the dots in order when our system receive the data nodes. The original data were recorded in Fahrenheit. Then, we converted the temperature unit to Celsius in visualization tool as shown in Figure 3. The “processing” is a Java based language so the results could be exported to a Java applet and used in a web browser-based management application. To convert the event-driven based data in query-based format, we applied the SQLite in our system with Python. SQLite is a self-contained, serverless database engine which is very fast and light weighted. Because it requires no configuration and stores information in ordinary disk files, SQLite is a popular choice as a database to backup data in cloud storage server. Based on the corresponding MAC address of the XBee node, SQLite database system record the temperature value and add timestamp simultaneously for that node. Figure 4 demonstrates a sample of our experimental data after the conversion (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Query based data converted from real-time WSN.

Conclusion

In this paper, we presented an XBee/ZigBee based WSN to collect and visualize the data in real time for smart buildings. We described the structure to build this IoT application. The framework combines both processing and python-based data visualization tool through a local computer and could be exported as a Java applet to integrate in a web page. Our work on this project can be further extended by uploading data on cloud server and using web crawling technique to extract data for third-parties who are interested in other IoT applications.

Acknowledgment

This work is supported in part by the Undergraduate Research Program of the City University of New York (CUNY) and the PSCCUNY grant.

https://lupinepublishers.com/computer-science-journal/fulltext/a-data-collection-and-visualization-system-for-smart-buildings.ID.000111.php

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By Jithin Emmanuel, Sr. Software Dev Manager, Verizon Media

On Tuesday, December 4th, I joined speakers from Spotinst, Nirmata, CloudYuga, and MayaData, at the Microservices and Cloud Native Apps Meetup in Sunnyvale.

We shared how Screwdriver is used for CI/CD at Verizon Media. Created by Yahoo and open-sourced in 2016, Screwdriver is a build platform designed for continuous delivery at scale.

Screwdriver supports an expanding list of source code services, execution engines, and databases since it is not tied to any specific compute platform. Moreover, it has a fully documented API and growing open source community base.

The meetup also featured very interesting CI/CD presentations including these:

A Quick Overview of Intro to Kubernetes Course, by Neependra Khare, Founder, CloudYuga

Neependra discussed his online course which includes some of Kubernetes' basic concepts, architecture, the problems it solves, and the model that it uses to handle containerized deployments and scaling. Additionally, CloudYuga provides training in Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos Marathon, Container Security, GO Language, Advanced Linux Administration, and more.

Achieving a Serverless Experience While Scaling with Kubernetes or Amazon ECS, by Amiram Shachar, CEO & Founder, Spotinst

Amiram discussed two important concepts of Kubernetes: Headroom and 2 Levels Scaling. Amiram also reviewed the different Kubernetes deployment tools, including Kubernetes Operations (Kops). Ritesh Patel, Founder and VP Products at Nirmata, demoed Spotinst and Nirmata. Nirmata provides a complete solution for Kubernetes deployment and management for cloud-based app containerization. Spotinst is workload automation software that’s focused on helping enterprises save time and costs on their cloud compute infrastructure. 

Data Agility for Stateful Workloads in Kubernetes, by Murat Karslioglu, VP Products, MayaData

MayaData is focused on freeing DevOps and Kubernetes from storage constraints with OpenEBS. Murat discussed accelerating CI/CD Pipelines and DevOps, using chaos engineering and containerized storage. Murat also explored some of the open source tools available from MayaData and introduced the MayaData Agility Platform (MDAP). Murat’s presentation ended with a live demo of OpenEBS and Litmus.