Websockets and RESTMQ – power to web applications

Sounds cocky but that’s it. Using RestMQ, which builds on twisted, cyclone and a stack of well proven software, you can provide your applications with a robust and flexible queue over http protocol. It already was possible using COMET and GET/POST/DELETE requests, but now with websockets support it got to a new level.

Release gibberish apart there is a cool small app which streams twitter data to a html/css/js based app. Why all that work, would you say, if I can use it directly (well, not that easy because you need to provide username/pass to twitter streaming service) ? Well, for mashing up data and filtering it before delivery. Also, twitter is a convenient source of streaming data for tests, but usually you would roll up your own data source.

An actor based concurrency model or browser-based map/reduce is trivial, just like retrieving data, programming the proper javascript code to do all the work and post i back to a new queue.

Check the repository at http://github.com/gleicon/restmq_websockets and a live demo at http://cowcat.net/restmq_ws/. Note that it needs a websockets capable browser (chrome or a recent webkit build) and it may be down due to my bandwidth constraints 🙂

RESTMQ – REST/JSON/HTTP based message queue

That’s not a replay from the last post. I’ve pushed into my github repo an initial, cleaned up version of RestMQ. This is special because it not only uses python and twisted, but cyclone, the twisted-based implementation of Tornado. Repo URL:  http://github.com/gleicon/restmq

My book at google books

Long ago I wrote a book about Linux Programming (portuguese only). I just saw that it is added to google books at http://books.google.com/books?id=nMoQKiQyHwwC . There are some cute previews, including a serial port circuit picture 😀

From ruby to python and more…

Hi. Long time no see eh ?

There is nothing wrong with Ruby. Fine language, great gems and so on. But its interpreter sucks. Since I had to cross compile it for arm, and later fooling around with it while a friend had to run some heavy weight gdb debugging on it, I noticed that most of it was sloppy. Worst than green threads and stuff which really matters when developing for a high load and concurrency environment, there are places that plainly sucks.

It’s a shame, because Ruby itself is great, and I really appreciate that you can do everything in a lot of ways. It makes porting libraries from other languages a breeze. I hope it gets better by 1.9 or 2.0.

Meanwhile, I started to do some stuff using python, specially for networked services. Check out my come back at  https://zenmachine.wordpress.com/web-services-and-twisted/

Cheers !