XRX is a new web development architecture that is a milestone in elegant simplicity. XRX stands for: XForms on the client REST interfaces and XQuery on the server Because XRX uses a single model for data (XML) it avoids the translation complexity of other architectures. The simplicity and elegance of XRX allows developers to focus on other value-added features of web application development and enables non-programmers to create a rich web interaction experience without the need to use procedural programming languages.
The State of Native XML Databases I’ve recently been asked by several people to summarize the state of native XML databases for those interested in exploring this space. IMHO, native XML databases are now roughly where relational databases were circa 1994: solid, proven technology that gets the job done but only if you pay big bucks to do it. However, there’s some promising open source activity on the horizon. To be brief, there are roughly four (maybe five) choices to consider: * Mark Logic * eXist * DB2 9 * Berkeley DB XML
AR for Java; ActiveObjects is an intuitive, pure-Java ORM. AO is designed from the ground up to be extremely simple and easy to use from an API standpoint. AO can be used with either an existing database schema, or it can auto-generate the database schema from the user-specified entity interfaces. ActiveObjects also supports Rails-style database migrations, allowing incremental changes and refactoring of the database schema without data loss.AO can perform better than data mapper ORMs due to its natural use of lazy-loading coupled with sophisticated caching mechanisms. However, performance is not the primary design goal of the project. Rather, the intention is to create an ORM which is powerful and yet extremely natural to use and integrate into your project. This design has lead to certain performance benefits (such as lazy-loading), but on the whole, data mapper ORMs are inherently slightly more performant than AO
Twitdom is an attempt to provide a consolidated view of all the applications developed for the Twitter ecosystem. It has been developed by Anuj Seth. Follow me on Twitter. This is to ensure that you can make the most effective use of the Twitter micro-blogging system. You can search for applications and submit new ones to the database as well.
In the months prior to leaving Heavy, I led an exciting project to build a hosting platform for our online products on top of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). We eventually launched our newest product at Heavy using EC2 as the primary hosting platform. I’ve been following a lot of what other people have been doing with EC2 for data processing and handling big encoding or rendering jobs. We set out to build a fairly standard LAMP hosting infrastructure where we could easily and quickly add additional capacity. In fact, we can add new servers to our production pool in under 20 minutes, from the time we call the “run instance” API at EC2, to the time when public traffic begins hitting the new server. This includes machine startup time, adding custom server config files and cron jobs, rolling out application code, running smoke tests, and adding the machine to public DNS. What follows is a general outline of how we do this.