Yesterday, I was at the last developers meetup in Palo Alto. As always, it was a very interesting time, as people gave lightning talks about many different subjects. Check out this link in a couple of days from now, as the organizer is going to link in more links and details from different presenters.
A couple of things that I found particularly interesting (in the order in which they were presented):
- A member of the team behind BuddyPoke shared some lessons learned behind his secret to scaling to millions of users. Unfortunately, I do not remember them all, but two of them were the use of sharding techniques for things like counters and to avoid using queries wherever possible. According to the presenter, BuddyPoke gets its data from the store almost exclusively through loading by primary key, and they avoid putting indexes on data wherever possible (<shameless-plug>if you'd like to use similar techniques in Java, check out my previous posts on a simple, key-based datastore api and efficient global counters. You can also download the sourcecode directly from this open source project.</shameless-plug>).
- Another developer is working on jiql, a JDBC driver for App Engine. In the long term, projects like this could be essential to ease of porting sql-based applications to App Engine, so I think it's worth checking out. I'd love to hear especially if anyone is using it to porting things like ActiveRecord in Rails or php-based stuff...
- There was a very nice demo on patching django-based applications to use the Jinja2 templating system, including a real life example on how it simplified life in a web application that the developer was building.
- A demo of a prototype that can broadcast browser content to a set of viewers (useful for broadcasting demos and training sessions): http://www.webnc.net
5 comments:
Good to meet you at the GAE meetup last night!
Your presentation was interesting too. It was fun to see you in person. Maybe you had left by then, but I showed http://www.webnc.net at the end. Did you see the demo?
Laurent.
> I showed http://www.webnc.net at the end. Did you see the demo?
Yes, I did see it. It was awesome! I did not write about it for 2 reasons:
- I did not remember the URL :-(
- Since the firefox plugin was not general availability yet, I was not sure whether drawing additional attention to your site was something you wanted at this stage. So, I thought I'd just refer to the meetup entry, and you could ping Bill if you wanted any links to your project in there.
I am interested in feedback, so pointing to the site is good.
Laurent.
I added webvnc to the post
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