Book Image

PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner's Guide

Book Image

PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

With the rise of Web 2.0, the need for a highly scalable database, capable of storing diverse user-generated content is increasing. MongoDB, an open-source, non-relational database has stepped up to meet this demand and is being used in some of the most popular websites in the world. MongoDB is one of the NoSQL databases which is gaining popularity for developing PHP Web 2.0 applications.PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner’s Guide is a fast-paced, hands-on guide to get started with web application development using PHP and MongoDB. The book follows a “Code first, explain later” approach, using practical examples in PHP to demonstrate unique features of MongoDB. It does not overwhelm you with information (or starve you of it), but gives you enough to get a solid practical grasp on the concepts.The book starts by introducing the underlying concepts of MongoDB. Each chapter contains practical examples in PHP that teache specific features of the database.The book teaches you to build a blogging application, handle user sessions and authentication, and perform aggregation with MapReduce. You will learn unique MongoDB features and solve interesting problems like real-time analytics, location-aware web apps etc. You will be guided to use MongoDB alongside MySQL to build a diverse data back-end. With its concise coverage of concepts and numerous practical examples, PHP and MongoDB Web Development Beginner’s Guide is the right choice for the PHP developer to get started with learning MongoDB.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
PHP and MongoDB Web Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

When should you not use GridFS


One of the major selling points of MongoDB is scalability. It has been designed with features that are supposed to help your application scale out. If you are developing your application to be highly scalable, and your use cases fit into one of those advantages of GridFS we discussed earlier in this chapter, you may consider it as your asset storage backend. But for a website that experiences small to medium traffic, serving files over GridFS rather than the filesystem is an overkill. As Martin Fowler rightly says, "Premature optimization is the root of all evil."

Also, benchmarks show that for serving small static files (JavaScript, CSS, and so on, on your website), using Apache or Nginx web server over the filesystem is faster than GridFS (Chris Heald has a very informative post on his blog available at http://www.coffeepowered.net/2010/02/17/serving-files-out-of-gridfs/). So you should stick to the filesystem if you only need to serve small files over HTTP...