Articles tagged with "queue"

We've been busy recently, but that doesn't stop us at ComputerMinds contributing back to the Drupal community! For our latest multilingual website, we needed an XML sitemap with alternate links and hreflang attributes. This site uses separate domains for each language - for example, www.example.se (??) and www.example.no (??). Search engines need these alternate links to help them understand how to match up each translation of a page, which are distributed across these different domains. But this site is built on our existing Drupal 7 e-commerce platform that uses the XML sitemap project, which has no support for alternate links (nor entity translation...

Queues are a wonderful way of separating different parts of a system. Once you have separated those parts you can do lots of interesting things, like be more fault tolerant or have a more responsive front end for your users.

For example, lets suppose that we have a website on which we can book a holiday. We can choose lots of different options and at the end of the process when we've booked the holiday we'd like to send the customer a nice PDF detailing all the options they've chosen.

Typically, in a PHP application, you'd have to process this...

[Aegir][aegir] is a very clever hosting system for [Drupal][drupal] that sites and provisions them on various servers and does lots of clever things. One of the clever things that it has had for a while is a task queuing system. You can ask Aegir to lots of different things all in one go, and Aegir will queue them up and run them at its own pace. This provides a really good separation from the front-end Aegir website and the back-end Aegir scripts.

We've been using Aegir in production for just under a year, and one thing that has bugged me...