Diagrams, cache and threads 101 (and a little ranting)
December 3, 2008
I’ve been using inkscape to draw diagrams, specially abusing its import openclipart feature, but I found out that for simple sequence diagrams, there is another great tool: http://www.websequencediagrams.com/.
Their API is clean and the text parsing very accurate.Choose “Napkin” in the style combo and click draw to see their demo.
I found it via another gem, this caching 101 page for dummies. Things like this and this ‘Threads primer’ are necessary reminder nowadays. There are a lot of butchered applications and architectures popping everywhere, and without these kind souls providing the best of them going thru basic concepts, we’re all doomed.
There goes my contribution, a kind of memcached 101, both in napkin and blue modern styles !
Paste the code below to generate these diagrams. Note the alt 'command' I used to put both cases in the same diagram. Gotta love that.Alice->Application: Asks for her Profile Application->Memcached: is Alice profile there \? alt Data is not cached yet Memcached->Application: No, it's not here Application->Database: get me Alice's Profile Database->Application: here is the data - it took me a lot of time, k \? Application->Memcached: set Alice Profile there else data is already cached yay Memcached->Application: Got it end Application-->Alice: Response (her profile data)