Jaikoo - Ruby, Merb, Datamapper & Web Applications

Friday round up 2008-02-29

Britain was built on Queues!

A long while ago I wrote about messaging systems and I’d just like to give a quick update on that. A couple of weeks ago Twitter released Starling and although simplistic I’ve found it very stable and even easier to use as it uses the same protocol as memcache. Something that might be of interest to people out there is this, Chris Wanstrath is working on an evented version of Starling which no doubt should give some performance gains.

Another queuing system I’ve been playing around with lately is conveyor which is based on the excellent thin and uses HTTP as it’s transport protocol. Usually the purist in me would recoil from the thought using a fat protocol like HTTP for something like messaging. However, I bet for most cases it performs Good Enough©. There’s always going to be a trade off between simplicity and performance and if you really want speed & features then I still recommend you look at RabbitMQ, but for most cases something like conveyor will definitely do.

Like Starling it’s extremely easy to get started as conveyor’s interface is just a web server that conforms to Rails like REST conventions. Documentation is a bit sparse but the test suite is comprehensive and easy to grok.

I’m too poor to afford a CDN so I made one

Finally I was going to describe a setup for a poor mans/cheap CDN… However it’s been a crazy week so I’ll leave it till the weekend.

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my mac's crawling a long this morning -
testing out javarebel's auto class reloading -
Show me the whale! Show me the whale! Show me the whale! -
@alanb :D -
Sun still pushing their cert bollox spam at me. I'm a Sun cert engineer and architect from the old days. Utter useless crap. -
Loving the rain.. First time in days I haven't sat trying to claw my eyes out with hay fever -
@alanb yep, strange but true:) -
@alanb most Brother printers have excellent Mac support, plus they're cheap and very reliable compared to my old samsung -
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Maven appears not to suck as much as it used to -
This is bloody cool! http://tinyurl.com/55h3oc -
@fuzzy_orange ha! dude it's not like we're at college when we used to do 5 day non stop coding binges.. Sleep more and get more work done;) -
functional programming for a disfunctional guy -
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@fuzzy_orange Get yourself checked out mate.. Sounds like a health problem. -
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Office move occurs on new iPhone day! -
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Knee deep in AWS -

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Online journal of Jonathan Conway a twenty something technologist, entrepreneur, husband, daddy of two, oh and lead architect at vzaar. Currently residing in London, UK.

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