Some random libraries
Random programming libraries that I have discovered in trying to solve some problems lately…
C++
Acedia: acedia is designed to be an easy to use C++ library. It provides an ERLANG like actor implementation with message passing and pattern matching. It’s main goal is to support development of distributed software – also across a network.
POCO: The POCO C++ Libraries (POCO stands for POrtable COmponents) are open source C++ class libraries that simplify and accelerate the development of network-centric, portable applications in C++.
Ruby
Sinatra: Embeddable website DSL
Nanite: Nanite is a new way of thinking about building cloud ready web applications. Having a scalable message queueing back-end with all the discovery and dynamic load based dispatch that Nanite has is a very scalable way to construct web application back-ends.
Journeta: Journeta is a dirt simple library for peer discovery and message passing between Ruby applications on a LAN.
That’s all for now. I’ve been working on some interesting stuff, developing a client registration and authentication system. I started out in C++ using boost::ASIO to handle server connections, but then I just got annoyed, switched to Ruby, and have been running along ever since. I am using Revactor (with a few personal tweaks in the code) to handle my components, SQLite3 for a simple database (though, I might have to switch to MySQL for production), and Sinatra for a web-interface (running on Thin with Shotgun). All in all, I must say that simply plugging in working components instead of having to develop the resources makes production so much easier… As always, hardware is cheaper than programmer hours.
Speaking of which, why did I not notice Amazon’s Auto Scaling and Load Balancing features before? If you don’t have the hardware resources to build your own cloud (Eucalyptus with Xen), Amazon really does seem like a very cheap alternative. I mean, think of all the money you save not having to hire I.T. guys to figure out why your harddrive failed in the middle of the night. Amazon does it all for you!
Hopefully, some sort of Cloud Computing standard will come out soon. The only current problem with Amazon’s model is that it doesn’t give the clients any leverage. Start using Amazon and you can’t make the threat to leave and go to Google (well, easily at least). Worse yet, if Amazon goes out of business, you are in a world of hurt. Eucalyptus adopted the Amazon scheme, so at least there is a bit of leverage saying that you will just buy your own hardware — but it would be much better if we could get some pricing competition going on.
