You may remember we mentioned in an earlier post we were to rent more space. After months of waiting, we’ve finally got the keys to it. The office is in the same building in the center of Nis but on a different floor. Quite spacious, with wall-to-wall windows in some parts and a great view of the town. We love it although it’s in grave need of renovation.

Once we have it restored, we’re to get some furniture over to the place. As soon that’s done, it’s just cleaning and stylishing it the geeky way. Here are some ‘before’ pictures.

We’re growing fast. In addition to our head office in Västerås, Sweden and office in Belgrade, we’re doubling our capacities in Nis with twenty-four developers on board.

PHP is currently the most popular server-side web programming language. It runs 33,53% of the websites on the Internet. Its widespread use for web development can be attributed to the fact it boasts the largest open source community, simplicity and high performance.

Given that PHP is our personal pick, we put together a list of interesting sites that use the same technology. The article outlines some of Alexa’s most popular websites running on PHP and looks into their architecture.

The first on our list is Yahoo, the most trafficked website on the planet with more than 130 million unique users. In 2002 the company switched from C/C++ to PHP. More on how and why they picked it after reviewing all the web technologies is available here.

Wikipedia, the 8th most popular website on the web and the largest online encyclopedia in the world. It’s built on MediaWiki, a platform written in PHP which powers many other popular wikis on the web.

For the skinny on Wikipedia design and architecture, we attached this workbook by Domas Mituzas, who works with Wikipedia and MySQL AB.

Flickr, the web’s leading photo sharing site hosting over 2 billion images. Looking inside Flickr’s general architecture, we found some noteworthy stats.

~ 60,000 lines of PHP code
~ 60,000 lines of templates
~ 70 custom smarty functions/modifiers
~ 25,000 database transactions/second at peak
~ 1,000 pages per second at peak

More is available in the presentation Cal Henderson gave to the Vancouver PHP Association in 2005.

Friendster, one of the largest social networking sites. It was founded in 2003. A traffic rank of 14 on Alexa and over 50 million users. In 2007 it won the Webware 100 Award for best community site.

Digg, a user driven social content website with over 1.2 million users. They started in late 2004 with a single Linux server running Apache 1.3, PHP 4, and MySQL. 4.0. Today it’s 100 servers hosted in multiple data centers. Further reading available on High Scalability, a nice source of information on the architecture of highly scalable sites.

LiveBid Auctions, a part of amazon.com and the leading provider of live-event auctions on the Internet.

SourceForge.net, the world’s largest development and download repository of Open Source code and applications.

Neopets, a virtual pet website with huge traffic levels. It started in 1999 as a small project by two British college students.

IstockPhoto, a royalty-free stock photo provider and most likely the most popular online photo library with over 2.2 million images as of October 2007.

Far from being complete, this list comprises only some of the most popular websites on the web running on PHP. Hope it has been interesting.

Great news at Troxo! We continue to build an awesome team and are stoked to welcome Radomir Mladenovic, our chief project officer.

With a strong development background and over thirteen years experience in the IT industry, Radomir will help us manage a number of software projects. We’re lucky to have him with us. His arrival to our team now brings the total number of Troxo DOO members up to twenty-three.

As we like to code to music here at Troxo we wondered about the effect it has on the brain. We have come across many studies here but one by Teresa Lesiuk, Assistant Professor at the University of Miami, immediately grabbed our attention as it dealt with the effect of music listening on software design in particular.

The study, which involved 56 developers from four different Canadian software companies, was implemented in the participants’ actual work environments over five weeks.

It showed that people produce more quality work while listening to music and they finish their work faster when listening to music. It also stated that work environments with music help enhance employee moods. You may download the full text here.

The beneficial effect of music listening on work efficiency gains even more importance when you take a look at this study by Yuko Fujigaki which states that stress is present throughout almost all phases of software development.

Oblivious to such a tremendous effect of music on work performance, we asked some of our developers and designers what music they listened to while coding. Basically, our tastes differ to some extent but we all agree that we love having it around.

Ivan, Senior Software Architect: While I’m working, I prefer listening to classical music. It helps me stay focused on problems and tasks I’m working on. Vivaldi and Mendelssohn are my favorites.

Sasa, Senior Software Architect: I prefer listening to music while coding and that is a natural working environment for me. The list of my favorites is very long, but what I always love listening to is good old rock. Pink Floyd is very soft, easy and makes a good working atmosphere.

Classical music is inspiring and I sometimes put it on too. When I’m deep into a problem, music just fills the empty space around, brakes the silence and makes me more relaxed.

Dejan, Graphic Designer: At the creative stage I love to put on loud energy-filled music such as Prodigy or the UT2003 soundtrack created by Starsky Partridge and Kevin Riepl (favorite song Chemical Burn).

When doing xhtml/css I tend to listen to softer music like Air, dZihan & Kamien, Kevin Yost, James Blunt, Nelly Furtado, Amy Winehouse. Jazz anytime: Thelonious Monk, Dexter Gordon, Chareles Mingus, Miles Davis…

This post was written to Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, (K. 448) to measure the disputed Mozart Effect.

We’ve got a new website in the pipeline which we’re really excited about. It’s been in the making for a while now. Our attention is currently focused on the development of various PHP apps but hopefully it’s going to be up and running very soon. We’re using WP as our CMS, which seems to be exactly what we needed.

Here’s a screenshot of the new look:

We love to hear from you. If you have any comments or feedback, you are welcome to send us an email at info at troxo dot com.

Things have been hectic this summer. We’re moving toward the end of another productive year with many interesting projects to work on and really cool clients to work with.

As you probably remember, we also have new programmers on the team which has really allowed us to stretch our wings when it comes to PHP programming. With Dusan and Marija on board, we now have a total of twenty developers working at full steam.

Yesterday we got together for a nice group photo. We felt it was high time we showed you our pretty faces.

We welcome our new members Marija and Dusan. They will join our custom PHP development team to help us produce more excellent web applications.

We already have very exciting projects for them and we invite more great people to join us!

It’s been exciting at Troxo and we are now looking for a project manager to oversee the development and implementation of a variety of web projects. This is a client-facing role so you need to be fluent in English as we have customers around the world.

You will manage dynamic development teams in a fast paced company and make sure projects are delivered on time, within budget and in the most efficient way. You’ll need to have excellent time management abilities with a can-do attitude.

In return, we offer a more than exciting environment, excellent conditions and we make sure you have everything you need to make your work more fun and creative, say a screen like this.

Send us your CV at job at troxo dot com. We are poised to hear from you if you fit the bill.

Our development center is based in Nis, central Serbia and we welcome all candidates willing to relocate.

This is one of the posts from the how-we-do-it series.

A while ago we had a part of a project where our client NSN ASA wanted to have:

• Custom reporting with an advanced mail merge function (to create invoices, order lists, etc.)
• Easy-to-create report templates, so they can be created by non-programmers
• Simple, simple, simple
• PHP API

Our first thought of course was to find an appropriate component and use it for this project. However, we were amazed to realize there isn’t any out-of-box solution for easy report creation from PHP. There surely are a lot of ready solutions like CrystalReports, Birt, Jasper reports with iReport, but we felt none of them met the above requirements (especially simplicity).

So, here is our approach to solving this problem:

• Report data should be sent via a standardized XML. There will be no more than hands full types of XML tags in the report data.

• Report template will be created with MS Word (after all, anyone can use it, right?)

• Template will have the simplest possible tagging system, implemented as MS WORD fields. (Example: <<tablestart>><<data1>><<data2>><<data3>><<tableend>>

• There are no good Unix components for handling Word files – therefore we will implement this on windows platform and expose SOAP interface for accessing it from PHP.

Now that this is up and running here is the small illustration of our “baby” in action:

We would like to thank NSN ASA for giving us the green light to share this with you.

A part of our team working exclusively for pingdom.com is back from Sweden after talks on further work on the project. It was hard work and fun at the same time, a combination that always works well at Troxo.

The meeting was really productive and will result in many new features Pingdom’s clients will receive during 2008. After the nitty-gritty, the team got down to a crayfish party, a traditional eating and drinking celebration in Sweden.

They say “one drink for every claw”, but few of us kept up that pace. It wasn’t all partying, though. Sightseeing in Stockholm, go-cart racing, a boat trip and a visit to an amusement park were also on the agenda.

And just when you think everything goes well…Remember JAT, whose uptime we had started monitoring before we took off? Although their site has faced no downtime, their service did have a big one. Our plane (after an unpleasant malfunction) departed as many as 14 hrs behind schedule. Quite a slip