June 15th, 2009
Jesse, Josh, and I gave a talk at this year’s Google I|O conference.
The title was AppEngine Nitty Gritty: Scalability, Fault-Tolerance, and Integrating With Amazon EC2. We gave high-level advice about how to design an application for high loads and how to architect an application that makes use of multiple cloud computing environments. We also went straight to the dirty grime and shed light on some issues we encountered while building the Walk Score API — issues like unpredictable data store contention and the failure of basic sharding techniques for certain high-scale features.
You can watch our presentation via YouTube. I hope you enjoy it!
May 28th, 2009
I find myself repeating myself when I write AJAX web applications.
First I write back-end code to define and manage my models. Then I write front-end code to do the same. The back-end code is in Python, or Ruby, or sometimes PHP. The front-end code is in JavaScript.
It seems absurd to have to define my models in two distinct languages. Worse, after I’ve done so, I have to write substantial glue code to round-trip changes from browser to server and back again.
Perhaps Google Web Toolkit (GWT) solves this problem for me? I haven’t dug deeply at all, but it seems as though I could simply define everything in Java and then let GWT handle the RPC work for me?
That would certainly be a plus in GWT’s favor. I’m not convinced it’s enough to balance out the two negatives I currently see: (1) you often have to “drop down” to HTML and JavaScript when tackling performance issues, and (2) you still have to use CSS; you still have to worry about cross-browser compatibility.
May 14th, 2009
Deliver us from TextMate, vi, and emacs.
Some years ago, we would have followed TextMate to whatever end. Now, however, we see that TextMate was a false prophet. He led us down a garden path but abandoned us before we reached the promised land. In our desperation, we turned to the elder sages: vi and emacs. Alas, they seem curiously unaware that it’s 2009. You know: 2009. The year before the year we make contact.
Editor Gods, we don’t ask for much. We just want an editor that makes us stand up and shout: “Hey! The future is here, and I’ve got a text editor to prove it!”
While we’re praying, we might as well let you know exactly what our hearts yearn for.
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