I benchedmarked the JavaScript engines of Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.5 and Chrome 2.0.172.33 using the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark. Here are the results:

Internet Explorer 8: 6071.4ms (results)
Firefox 3.5: 1492.8ms (results)
Google Chrome 2.0.172.33: 749.8ms (results)

In conclusion, IE is still inexplicably shit, taking 6 seconds overall to complete the various tasks. Google Chrome still has the faster engine, despite the release of Firefox 3.5 yesterday. Whoop.

There is a neat little PHP 5 class written by Donovan Schönknecht that allows you to access and manage both your Amazon S3 and CloudFront distributions right from your PHP scripts, allowing distributed file access without the need for manual intervention.

I know it’s how the service is meant to be accessed in the first place, and this script is one of the better additions to the growing number of S3 access methods popping up over the internet.

To use it on a basic level:

(Assuming text.txt is a file in the same directory as that script, along with the class.)

Neat and fast :)

I started off using the Firefox Addon S3Fox to upload files from my desktop PC to my S3 distribution. I didn’t much like it – partly because it was just an addon, and therefore closed with Firefox, but partly because it was pretty lacking in functionality, and overall was pretty sluggish to use. (Screenshot).

I had used the Manager for Amazon CloudFront – which was pretty good for basic stuff, and uploading the odd file. One major flaw of this software though was that it has no kind of queue system, making tasks like uploading the FamFamFam icon set impossible, given that I’d have to upload 1,000 files individually. (Screenshot).

Then I found the CloudBerry Explorer after quite a long session of Google searching. This software seemed too good to be true, it did everything that I needed in a free desktop application, and much more. Every feature of Amazon S3 is accounted for as far as I can see – from Access Logging to setting the headers of certain files, it’s all there. CloudBerry Explorer also is amazingly fast, which, coupled with a file queueing system knocks the socks off S3Fox’s speed.

The software also easily integrates CloudFront Distributions – giving your bucket a different icon if it’s part of a distribution.

All in all, the software is awesome for a free piece of kit. (Screenshot showing S3 and CloudFront distributed buckets).

I first saw these services a while ago, and really thought they were way above my head. At the end of last month I decided to try them; partly because I wanted a scalable and globally distributed place to host the SimpleStats tracker code, and partly because I love to play with services like that.

Amazon S3 is almost a convention amongst web developers nowadays, partly because its price, but a large part of S3’s success is the fact that Amazon, one of if not the largest on-line retailers and probably one of the most trusted brands on the internet. I know I was certainly bought by the trust aspect when I first looked at the services about a year ago, but then had no need to investigate any further.

For those who don’t know what S3 is or does, S3 provides an on-line storage space that is highly scalable and very low in price, with a pay as you go business model which is great for people like me who don’t have a massive budget, nor need to transfer terabytes of data in and out of their website. Amazon CloudFront is a distrubution side to the service, it offers geographical datacentre localization to your site’s visitors so they get the best speed that their connection can obtain whilst downloading from your S3 “bucket”. Twitter uses it for example, to host profile images.

All of my blog uploads and resources are now handled by my Amazon S3 and CloudFront accounts, and I couldn’t be happier with the service. Taking this past month as an example, my bandwidth usage statistics for bandwidth were as follows:

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