Quite a large proportion of my day-to-day job involves the design, implementation and ongoing improvement of an in-house API.

As a result of this, a commonly identified bottleneck arises when dealing with large, ‘expensive’ data. This is commonly seen when an application posts a large volume of well structured data to the API (that some process must be carried out upon), before some form of structured receipt is then returned as a request response.

Analysing such a request tends to show high PHP CPU usage with lower database consumption. This means that with an increase in data processing capacity we could make more use of this redundant database resource.

The structured nature of data exchanged via an API means that we can, relatively simply and reliably, divide the submitted data and process it simultaneously with the help of a great tool called Gearman.

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For the second in my mini-series looking at Object Oriented Design within the Kohana framework I am going to look at the Facade pattern. I had this down for the third article, but I had a comment on the last one voicing some thoughts on a common grey area when it comes to this and the adapter pattern, and so I thought I would jump straight to the facade pattern in an attempt to clear up any confusion!

When it comes to design pattern history the starting point should probably be the book “Design Patterns Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Gamma, Helm, Johnson and Vlissides“. Most commonly referred to as the Gang of Four (GoF) the authors outlined 23 design patterns, potential solutions as they saw them to many common programing scenarios. When reading articles about design patterns you will often come accross references to the pages on which these patterns were described first, so if you havn’t allready I would strongly suggest getting hold of a copy and taking a look.
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Thought I would do a couple of posts on some basic Object Oriented design patterns and examples of their implementation within the Kohana framework. They’re not going to go into any great detail but will hopefully provide a small insight into some of the inner workings of Kohana and enable  you to make full use of some of the inherent power these patterns provide.

This article covers the adapter pattern. You can see some of the Kohana system libraries making use of this pattern by checking out the system/libraries directory. Within this directory you will find the drivers folder, for now take a quick look at it and see if you recognise any of the class names, we’ll come back to it later.

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