July 2009
13 posts
4 tags
Erlang Multicast Presence/Discovery Notification
Overview
Just for fun, I thought I’d show a tiny Erlang app (or library) I started for a project I was going to write in Erlang, but which got cancelled before I could finish up all the infrastructure pieces.
elib_ping, as I call it, enables services running on Erlang nodes to find each other without having to configure them at start time. Of course, this works as long as they’re...
2 tags
Build Your Next Web App with Erlang →
Pointer to a PDF surveying the current web application frameworks available in Erlang.
3 tags
Case Study: An Asynchronous Web Service (Part 3 of...
Overview
There are two other parts to this epic story:
Part 1, about the problem we had to solve (validating product serial numbers), and the resources available to us to solve the problem, and
Part 2, about our solution: using an asynchronous web service as an external interface to our application, and asynchronous messaging as the backbone of the internal architecture.
This third and...
4 tags
Case Study: An Asynchronous Web Service (Part 2 of...
Overview
This is part 2 of a 3 part series about an asynchronous web service I worked on a few years ago which lead to a lot of the ideas I now hold about how to design distributed systems. In part 1, I talked about the problem we had to solve, which was:
create a web service to validate serial numbers, and
figure out how to negotiate numerous internal resources, not all of which are...
4 tags
Case Study: An Asynchronous Web Service (Part 1 of...
General Problem
A company I worked for (let’s just call it The Company) sold a lot of products and offered a lot of rebates. The rebates were processed by a Rebate Processor company which took in the numbers and other rebate information from customers (such as product descriptions), did all the paperwork, sent out the cash, then billed The Company for its efforts.
In other words, The...
1 tag
“Indeed, it’s not really clear to me that operating systems is a valid...”
– Unqualified Reservations: Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces
2 tags
Initial Thoughts on Asynchronous REST
Tim Bray’s article got me thinking about REST and about synchronous vs asynchronous interfaces.
What really got me interested in asynchronous services, especially message-based services of the fire-and-forget kind, was how helpful such things were as you develop and maintain services over time, and across organizations, or even across the “divide” between one head-strong...
1 tag
embedded applications with yaws →
Nick Gerakines on writing a web app with embedded Yaws. No discussion of how to use Yaws if you can’t actually install it on the machine you deploy to, but I think I can figure that out. Anyway, pretty straight forward.
2 tags
a restful web service demo in yaws →
Nick Gerakines’ complete demo of a REST style web service, using Yaws. I’m a bit ambivalent towards Yaws because it seems too heavyweight for the kinds of things I like to do. In other words, I need an embedded solution, not a stand-alone, Apache replacement solution. Not that Yaws can’t be embedded….
What I especially love is the pattern matching part at the bottom, and...
2 tags
tumblr tag clouds →
A mashup hack to create a tag cloud on your tumblr blog.
1 tag
erlang and jobs
People in my line of work (writing distributed, network applications) seem to be afraid of Erlang. Several reasons, I think:
Developers
Something new to learn, and thus they feel that they’re at a disadvantage, or won’t be able to contribute.
Managers
Worried that they won’t be able to find developers to work on the code base once the original authors leave, and fear that...
1 tag
notes on project management
The following are notes I wrote up on Project Management some time ago. Obviously not those of an expert, but having been subject to the project management of others, I’m certainly an expert on what I want.
The most important thing is to mediate between the waterfall needs of business planning and the iterative needs of software developers. What to communicate, and even more importantly,...
