MongoDB supports rich documents that can include, among other things, embedded documents. This feature embodies a has-a relationship quite nicely and can, if modeled properly, reduce the number of finds required to ascertain certain data as there are no joins in Mongo.

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The Great Mobile App Debate rages on; in fact, it seems of late, the debate has been heating up dramatically. And interestingly enough, some intriguing people are joining this lively discussion including Martin Fowler.

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Without a doubt, one of the quickest ways to build an application that leverages MongoDB is with Node. It’s as if the two platforms were made for each other; the sheer number of Node libraries available for dealing with Mongo is testimony to a vibrant, innovative community. Indeed, one of my favorite Mongo focused libraries these days is Mongoose.

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Redis supports master-slave replication and it’s extremely easy to setup. And the beauty of setting up replication is that all you have to do is fire up a slave instance and have it point to some other Redis instance (which then becomes the master node).

Accordingly, open up the redis.conf file for an intended secondary (or slave node) and find the section containing a slaveof phrase. Uncomment it and add the IP address & port of the master node:

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In a recent conversation with my friend Jonathan Stark we talked about how much has changed in mobile web development since he and I chatted about cross-platform mobile development in November of 2011. Of particular interest was how much adoption mobile web sites have achieved in less than a year – yet, the adoption hasn’t always been smooth.

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I recently read an article on TheServerSide.com where the author muses about the possible disruptive nature of Typesafe’s recent Series B cash infusion of $14M:

It’s time for a disruptive event that will change how programs are designed, and how applications target the Java Virtual Machine.

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• Feed: The Disco Blog
• Original article

Because it’s my bag, I’ve been spending a lot of time these days deep in Ruby code. Nevertheless, from time to time, I do find myself ensconced in Java via the Android platform. Jumping back and forth between various languages like Ruby, Java, and JavaScript can be a lot of fun; what’s more, doing so broadens one’s view on various practices, idioms, and influences conveyed by a particular community.

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Installing Ruby version 1.9.2 (which as of this writing, is not the most recent version, however, our production stack relies on this version for now) on Ubuntu Precise Pangolin (12.04 LTS) can be a bit tricky due to a nasty OpenSSL incompatibility. Nevertheless, with a sneaky code edit, you can be on your way using 1.9.2 in a matter of minutes.

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I recently had the pleasure of writing a review of MongoDB for InfoWorld. For those unfamiliar with MongoDB (or Mongo for short), it’s an “open source, schema-free document store written in C++ that boasts support for a wide array of programming languages, a SQL-like query language, and a number of intriguing features related to performance and scalability”; what’s more, it has excellent documentation and a strong community.

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At App47, our production MongoDB instance is managed by MongoHQ — that is, we use their PaaS to host our data and leave the details of running and maintaining MongoDB instances up to them. It’s a handy service and worth the money at this point in our company’s evolution (eventually we might need more control over our instances and thus might look to take on some of these responsibilities, etc).

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MongoDB is a scalable, high-performance, document-oriented schemaless database. This short demo, entitled “An Introduction to MongoDB“, provides a quick tour of its use, and helps you understand where it’s most applicable. You’ll see first hand how to leverage Mongo’s shell and use its JavaScript syntax to CRUD data.

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Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) borrows what it needs from message-oriented middleware (MOM) but doesn’t lock you in to any one implementation language or framework. In this article, entitled “Cloud-based messaging with Amazon SQS” learn how to use Amazon SQS to alleviate the burden of installing and maintaining a message-queuing system, while leveraging the pay-as-you-go scalability of AWS.

Follow along as this demo, entitled “An introduction to Amazon SimpleDB“, guides you through an introduction to SimpleDB, a massively scalable, highly available key/value datastore.

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Java developers have historically perceived JavaScript as a toy language, both too lightweight for real programming and too clunky to be of use as a scripting alternative. And yet JavaScript is still around, and it’s the basis of exciting web technologies like GWT and Node.js.

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Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) offloads the work of maintaining a database to Amazon Web Services, which makes it exceptionally easy to increase or swap out your application’s data storage. This article, entitled “Play-ing with Amazon RDS” revisits a location-based cloud-to-mobile application, swapping the original NoSQL datastore for a traditional RDBMS. It’s a breeze using the Play framework and the AWS console.