Urbantastic Blog - Latest Comments in Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

chlai88 — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 03:41:50 -0000

You know what, I've come to exactly the same conclusions as you do as a soloist. Absolutely agree with frameworks giving u a breezy 90% with the remaining horrifying 10%. And yes, it's very important also to like what we are using, even if it sounds like a lot of work, the like part sort of makes up for it. I believe eventual simplification in web development will lie more & more in new DSL languages tuned for the web rather than bet the framework path to death. Will take a look at Compojure/Clojure when I find time :)

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

Vincent Murphy — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 07:33:24 -0000

Reddit comments:
http://www.reddit.com/r/pro...

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

Vincent Murphy — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 07:32:06 -0000

Reddit comments:
http://www.reddit.com/r/pro...

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

digash — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:13:10 -0000

Since your highest risk is CouchDB, have you looked at the competitor MongoDB (http://www.mongodb.org/)?
It is also quite new, but already have some application using it in prod and very simple to use.

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

John — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 01:00:26 -0000

So, are you not interested in being indexed by Google? Or is the solution you are working on for mobile browsers etc going to provide SE friendly content as well? if so, any plans for avoiding getting flagged for cloaking?

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

Bob Follek — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 11:34:26 -0000

I"m curious - did you try compojure and run into problems? Or did you just get a sense of "not ready for prime time?"

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

Ben — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 01:06:53 -0000

Hi Heath - greetings from Mount Pleasant!

Your stack sounds good. I use a similar Json->JS approach where it makes sense. I'm using GAE a lot and have been very happy with it - 100k req/sec at my busiest time daily. I'm curious to know what problems you encountered.

Ben

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

Box — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 21:25:38 -0000

Did you get hit by a bus? Awesome ad campaign by the way.

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

Ryan Christensen — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 21:09:43 -0000

Would love to hear more about the google appengine change and more on your work with couchdb and why. I have apps there running and have probably ran into some of the same limitations that take some thought (i.e. searchable text, deep results paging etc). I have been working on a framework very similar to what you mention with rest services as the database for most elements that can be easily scaled on any platform (or combinations). The one thing that pushed this way was economics as well, the more requests are done on client machines to other endpoints the more you can horizontally scale and the less inter-request connectivity you need with HTTP based services/data.

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

Jason Dusek — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 20:12:29 -0000

I would be very interested to know more about why you left GAE.

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

heathjohns — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:57:48 -0000

Yes. I've talked about what I've implemented, but I won't specifically advocate it until it's seen some road-miles.

The site's only a little over a month old at this point...

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

heathjohns — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:55:27 -0000

The nice thing about being a non-profit is that there's no argument against open sourcing. I intend to release the whole site under an OSS license when things settle out a bit.

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

heathjohns — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:54:15 -0000

Right now there's no Javascript-less option. I'm working on a front end to fix this, however. This will cover IE6, mobile, screen readers, web spiders, etc. It's going to be very simple but fully functional. Think the HTML-only option for Gmail.

However, you are right about the document model. Urbantastic is very much an application, not a CMS system. Just as it doesn't make sense to index Gmail, it wouldn't make sense to index us.

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

Giles Bowkett — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:53:26 -0000

Can you release parts of this system as open source? I'd like to take a deeper look at it, and experiment with it.

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

heathjohns — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:46:34 -0000

It's still being written, but there's a front end which will cover all the minority users: IE6, mobile, screen readers, web spiders etc. It will be very simple, but fully functional.

In our particular case we're not interested in having Google index the dynamic content of our site - we have much more in common with Gmail than, say, a CMS system.

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

heathjohns — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:42:25 -0000

Hey Anoush!

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

heathjohns — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:41:59 -0000

Yes, it's definitely a factor. I typically put all of the checks on the back end first, and then duplicate some of them on the client. The ones I duplicate are usually just for user experience's sake, and so end up being slightly different anyway.

There's an effort called ClojureScript that might help with the code duplication. But as it stands, though, I actually like having to two separate checkpoints in place. I've caught some of my own mistakes this way, and in the worst case scenario are far more likely to give a false negative than a positive, which is a better failure state than an inconsistant db.

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

heathjohns — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:32:19 -0000

Thanks for the link... I've been meaning to check it out - it means a lot to hear that there's a high-volume site that uses it.

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

nimai — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:30:29 -0000

I'm curious to hear how your stack is working out for you. It's definitely interesting technology, I guess in a years time when you've got a whole heap of code to maintain, it'd be really good if you write up a "in hindsight" blog where you talk about the things that have worked and haven't

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

heathjohns — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 19:28:19 -0000

I'm running Nginx which serves up all the static content, and also forwards certain requests (based on the url) to a different port. On that port I'm running Clojure, which uses the Jetty library to present an HTTP interface.

That Clojure server is where the "business" logic resides, and it, in turn, sits on top the CouchDB database (again, connected via HTTP).

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

Mark Watson — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 18:43:27 -0000

I browsed thru Urbantastic, and I must say i'm quite impressed; the pages load in a snap. You have some very interesting ideas with LISP, CouchDB, etc.

One thing I noticed however, and I think it's kind of a downside to separating out the dynamic and static sections, is that when one turns off javascript on all the content goes completely away. My impression is that it's cool if an email client requires javascript to work, but having an informational site do this completely breaks the linked document metaphor of the web. I would be really interested to know how it's even possible for search engines to index this... But maybe I'm just being too closed minded about the whole thing. :)

*Deep breath* You really should blog about why Google App Engine didn't work out for you, I'd love to hear about it. The reason I ask is because I've been getting into using it, and it seems almost too perfect and awesome to be true...

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

Al — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:10:34 -0000

Your idea is showing a consistent approach, both microscopic (choice of language) as well as macroscopic (client-server architecture).
Does it carry some risk? You bet! but I think placing yourself ahead of the curve will pay handsomely soon.

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

Andres — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 13:27:52 -0000

And how exactly is clojure used? Are you using any particular server or lib?

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

Patrick S — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:46:59 -0000

I find your choice of Clojure for the web side interesting, especially w/o using compojure. Partly because I went away from Clojure for the presentation layer for that very reason. Instead I'm looking at doing my back end processing using it (for the increased speed) and my front end using Python w/Django. Will be very interesting to see how your method works by comparison.

Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

Drekar — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:38:29 -0000

Your observation that the fundamental context has changed is dead-on. I am doing something much akin myself, and have luckily come to the same conclusions. That's a good sign! Keep up posting, I wish I took the time to make a blog...