I have updated the article comparing the different php libraries that allow encoding/decoding of JSON data.

Besides testing the latest version of all the libraries involved and briefly summarizing the evolution since the november test, he new page has benchmark results for php 4.4.


Here it is.


Enjoy.

Tales from the trenches.

Two companies develop a communication protocol to exchange information between their respective systems. SOAP is picked up, presumably because of all its enterprise-trendiness.
One company builds a J2EE application, the other one a single C++ builder win32 exe. Both sides can receive and send messages.
The applications get tested by the developers while at their respective office, and declared ready to go….

…but fail to exchange a single message when deployed in the production environment, which includes quite a few extra devices:

• https encryption over the internet part
• your run-of-the-mill layer 3 firewall
• an application-layer firewall terminating the https connections and applying layer 7 http filtering
• another application-layer firewall applying antivirus scanning

The developers have no clue as to what might be causing the problem, and are prone to point fingers against the “bad firewalls”.

In fact:

• the java guys are helpless in locating errors, because they never look at the http layer which should supposedly be carrying the xml messages. All they know are the java objects that the framework builds for them. If any error occurs in handling the http connection, xml (de)serialization or https handshake they do not know - all they get is an empty pointer (note: presumably the informative, verbose exception that would help in debugging is being catched too early inside the framework itself, and the coders do not dare split it open)
• the c++ guys are helpless in locating errors, because their app in fact knows nothing about xml and much less about http. It reads strings from sockets and writes strings to sockets. The received strings are parsed, presumably by regexps, while the outgoing messages are built from .txt template files with very basic token substitution

There is really something interesting in comparing the two approaches to development: on one side the communication protocol is completely abstracted away, so much in fact that it cannot be examined at all; on the other side the protocol is not handled at all, and old-school quick-n-dirty pragmatic coding has produced the bare minimum necessary to fake understanding the language, while in reality not being able to speak it at all.

(more…)