Andy

Easy ORM-ness for GAE, part 2

Andrew Glover — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 16:32:45 -0500

As I’ve blogged and written about on various occasions, Google App Engine doesn’t just scale apps: it can also help you assemble them rapidly, using slick tools. Part 2 of “Twitter mining with Objectify-Appengine” wraps up the domain model for a Twitter-mining application, adding hooks for indexing and caching.

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The cloud according to CloudBees

Andrew Glover — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 15:59:37 -0500

The notion of the cloud has certainly evolved from some abstract definition of shared resources into a model whereby infrastructures have differentiated themselves from platforms. That is, while one might group Amazon and Google into cloud providers, their solutions are vastly different. AWS remains an infrastructure as a service while GAE is a platform as a service.

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.NET eye for the Java guy

Andrew Glover — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 15:21:47 -0500

I recently had the pleasure of catching up with my old friend, Ted Neward. As anyone who has ever had the occasion of inquiring into Ted’s opinions knows, Mr. Neward is a veritable fire hose of technical knowledge intermixed with random thoughts, name dropping, and rants, all of which makes a conversation with Ted unpredictable, and yet, a lot of fun.

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SQL for the NoSQL

Andrew Glover — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 09:31:29 -0500

But there is one slight issue with NoSQL. You can’t use SQL.

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Google datastore discussion

Andrew Glover — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 10:06:05 -0500

Google’s datastore, known as Bigtable, is a column-oriented NoSQL datastore that is accessible via Google App Engine. Rather than the schemas you’d find in a relational database, Bigtable is basically a massively distributed persistence map — one that permits queries on keys and attributes of the underlying data values. Working with the datastore is vastly different than what you’ve probably grown accustomed to with traditional relational systems.

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JSON-able domain objects

Andrew Glover — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 19:25:10 -0500

JSON has arguably become the new lingua franca of the Internet; that is, JSON has become preferable for browser to server communication — over that of XML, which, as it happens, is quite verbose. JSON’s lightweight-ness makes it easily readable and easy to parse.

For example, in the case of a Retweet object (which represents a Twitter retweet), I can represent it easily enough in JSON like so:

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Easy ORM-ness for GAE

Andrew Glover — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 14:47:50 -0500

Objectify-Appengine is one of an emerging class of tools that extend the convenience of NoSQL, in this case by providing a Hibernate-style mapping layer between your application and the GAE datastore.

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CouchDB goes mobile

Andrew Glover — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 16:07:07 -0500

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with two super smart guys working for CouchOne (FYI, CouchOne was founded by Damien Katz, the creator of CouchDB).

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Moving to Git from Subversion?

Andrew Glover — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 16:18:32 -0400

Are you thinking of using Git? Are you coming from a Subversion mindset? If so, then you’ll appreciate the Git-Svn Crash Course wiki page offered by the Git team. This one-stop shop describing core Git commands and analogous SVN commands has been quite helpful to me. You too can clone, commit, pull, and push with the best of them, baby!

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Testing Grails services with easyb

Andrew Glover — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 16:32:25 -0400

The Grails easyb plugin has a nifty feature for obtaining instances of service classes. Simply call inject along with the name of your service (i.e. “dateService”) and it’ll auto-magically be available as a variable.

Before you can use this feature, you first must install the easyb plugin like so:

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Open source and the search for ET

Andrew Glover — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 17:50:50 -0400

Ever watched the movie Contact or read the book? Interestingly enough, the organization behind those big “listening” telescopes featured in the aforementioned story recently open sourced a series of projects designed to help infer non-noise from noise.

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Gaelyk stories are easyb

Andrew Glover — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 13:21:01 -0400

On the heels of easyb’s newest release and the addition of a Google App Engine plugin for easyb comes another plugin: easyb-gaelyk. Briefly,

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App Engine stories are easy

Andrew Glover — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 13:07:17 -0400

With the release of easyb 0.9.8, a new plugin has hit the streets that enables easyb to more easily verify Google App Engine applications running locally.

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easyb team releases 0.9.8

Andrew Glover — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 13:39:27 -0400

The easyb team is proud to announce the release of easyb 0.9.8! easyb 0.9.8 includes a host of new features, many of which are available due to the reworking of story execution by Richard Vowles. easyb stories are now executed in logical order rather than sequential; thus, for example, after type clauses can be defined anywhere in a story. Shared stories now work across files too.

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Discussing the role of an architect

Andrew Glover — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 09:21:43 -0400

My friend Ken Sipe often gives a presentation entitled “So you want to be an Architect” where he explores the role of an architect — a lot of people attend this talk so I was most interested in catching up with him to discuss this subject in more detail.

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MongoDB conversation

Andrew Glover — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 14:37:46 -0400

Not long ago, I had the distinct pleasure of chatting with Eliot Horowitz, the CTO of 10gen (the commercial company behind MongoDB). In this podcast, Eliot talks about MongoDB, which is a scalable, high-performance, open source document database. Eliot does a wonderful job of describing how MongoDB can fit into your toolkit and how it differs from alternatives like CouchDB.

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Introduction to MongoDB

Andrew Glover — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 14:30:38 -0400

If you’re exploring the world of NoSQL databases, then MongoDB — sometimes billed as the NoSQL RDBMS — deserves a place on your list. In IBM developerWorks “MongoDB: A NoSQL datastore with (all the right) RDBMS moves“, you’ll learn all about MongoDB’s custom API, interactive shell, and support for RDBMS-style dynamic queries, as well as quick and easy MapReduce calculations.

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Groovy ETLs with Scriptella

Andrew Glover — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 14:16:36 -0400

The open source BI, reporting, and ETL space is bursting at the seams with capable tools. In fact, I recently had a conversation with Tim Berglund regarding open source business intelligence where he specifically mentions two highly regarded tools: Pentaho and Talend. These tools do everything under the sun when it comes to BI, including ETL.

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Concurrency conversation

Andrew Glover — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 16:40:56 -0400

I recently had the opportunity to catch up with Alex Miller and hear this thoughts on concurrency. In this podcast, Alex talks about various concurrency models, such as actors, agents, and dataflow (just to name a few). Alex does a great job of explaining why parallel programming is challenging (to do correctly, that is) and is able to elaborate on each model’s pros and cons.

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CouchDB for the relational

Andrew Glover — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 15:14:43 -0400

Baron Schwartz, the lead author of Oreilly’s “

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OAuth-ing Twitter with Twitter4J

Andrew Glover — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:53:25 -0400

Twitter turned off basic authentication. Finally. Henceforth, you can’t log into Twitter via its API in the traditional sense; accordingly, the following code, which uses Twitter4J isn’t valid any longer:

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Open source business intelligence

Andrew Glover — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 09:15:23 -0400

I recently caught up with Tim Berglund and had a hip conversation with him regarding open source business intelligence. Tim points out that business intelligence tools have traditionally been a high-cost part of any enterprise’s software inventory (involving lots of golf and armies of consultants); however, options have emerged that allow teams to build credible business intelligence stacks out of entirely open-source components.

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Sharding with Hibernate

Andrew Glover — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 08:28:41 -0400

As I’ve pointed out before, sharding isn’t for everyone, but it’s one way that relational systems can meet the demands of huge data. For some shops, sharding means being able to keep a trusted database like MySQL in place without sacrificing data scalability or system performance.

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MongoDB and CouchDB: vastly different queries

Andrew Glover — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 15:51:10 -0400

Both MongoDB and CouchDB are document-oriented datastores.

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Concrete concurrency werewolves

Andrew Glover — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 10:48:44 -0400

Cédric Beust has an interesting blog post entitled “Clojure, concurrency and silver bullets” where he takes issue with the notion that Clojure can yield code that

is multithread safe and it will automatically scale.

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