In a new post to the Ibuildings techPortal today, Patrick van der Velden shares some of his thoughts about one of the presentations given at this year's Dutch PHP Conference - Think like an ant, distribute the workload.

[Helgi's] presentation started off explaining to us why distributing can be a good thing by pointing out three significant aspects: budget, efficiency and perception. Budget-wise, for a distributed application there is no need to invest in a big, expensive and hard to maintain server that runs the entire application by itself. A company can save a significant amount of money investing in a collection of smaller or virtual servers or even use "the cloud".

Patrick goes on to mention some of the other key points Helgi made about distributing the workload out from a point of user contact to other "workers", decoupling your application into functional pieces, designing for distributed computing from the start and making internal APIs between the sections of the application to make communication simpler. The slides of Helgi's presentation are also posted on Slideshare.