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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• Andrew Glover's blog
• 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.