my php-driven thoughts

Ok, so we're off with the portal, but at launch moment it didn't have PMs (personal messeges) feature. So my colegue helped me and made an awsome PM implementation (it's still under dev, though).

Of course we could have made it with IMAP back-end, but because of our cut on hosting and servers we're doing it SQL back-ended.

So normally one would do two tables (for inbox and outbox) and stuff one message into both tables. But my colegue came up with very brilliant and unique idea! Make three tables (read on...):

• One for all the messages (the 'container');
  
• One for INBOX (with message ids from first table);
  
• One for OUTBOX (with message ids from first table);
  

The first table with all the messages holds message id, text, sender, time, etc. AND additional field which states where message should be shown (or for a user sight - deleted/kept). If message is indicated as hidden (read: deleted) in both (inbox and outbox) it is deleted from 'container' as well. But to keep our server load as low as possible - there's cron'ed script for deleting all 'hidden' messages at midnight as well with other needless data (users that deleted their account, etc.).

Isn't that awsome?!

Have read a few articles on Ajax. The newest fashion-tech-rage at the moment. Have some thoughts on realizing it in my job (got quite big project at the time with death-line marching in). First thing on my mind - as any other good thing it has own drawbacks. Quite some coding must be done to make a page with ajax /(fool|hack|xss)-proof/. At current situation most of projects are based on "must-code-quickly" and not "must-code-to-make-good-performance" aspect 'cause of current hardware on the market. And for this we have abstractions, wrappers and other thing to make us live (and code) with b[u|i]gg[i|]er performance.

If anyone is reading this, could you please provide me with some actual applications? I mean lots of frameworks (namely PHP, dunno about other languages) are Ajax-based, but web-site? A colegue gave me some links (oh, and please don't forget almighty GMail (tm)), but i haven't been convinced about using it in small projects which require little or none server-side coding.

Just makes me think of upcoming new technologies (yes, i know, that ajax is not a technology), what next? Make a webpage, that can shake you Shakeratto (i think i mis-spelled it)? And again everyone will be reading megabytes of api-documentation, tutorials, articles'n'stuff. In a few months everything will be forgotten. Until other tech-fashion-rage comes.