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Hot Code Loading in Node.js

Simon Willison - Simon Willison - January 31, 2010

Hot Code Loading in Node.js. Blaine Cook’s patch for Node.js that enables Erlang-style hot code loading, so you can switch out your application logic without restarting the server or affecting existing requests. This could make deploying new versions of Node applications trivial. I’d love to…

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Introducing BERT and BERT-RPC

Simon Willison - Simon Willison - October 22, 2009

Introducing BERT and BERT-RPC. Justification for inventing a brand new serialisation protocol: Thrift and Protocol Buffers both use IDLs and code generation, XML “is not convertible to a simple unambiguous data structure in any language I’ve ever used” and JSON lacks support for unencoded binary…

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How We Made GitHub Fast

Simon Willison - Simon Willison - October 22, 2009

How We Made GitHub Fast. Detailed overview of the new GitHub architecture. It’s a lot more complicated than I would have expected—lots of moving parts are involved in ensuring they can scale horizontally when they need to. Interesting components include nginx, Unicorn, Rails, DRBD, HAProxy,…

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PubSub-over-Webhooks with RabbitHub

Simon Willison - Simon Willison - July 01, 2009

PubSub-over-Webhooks with RabbitHub. RabbitMQ, the Erlang-powered AMQP message queue, is growing an HTTP interface based on webhooks and PubSubHubBub.

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Parallel merge sort in Erlang

Simon Willison - Simon Willison - March 15, 2009

Parallel merge sort in Erlang. Thoughts on an Erlang-y way of implementing a combined activity stream (e.g. Facebook and Twitter). Activity streams are a Really Hard Problem—as far as I know there’s no best practise for implementing them yet.

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GeoCouch: Geospatial queries with CouchDB

Simon Willison - Simon Willison - October 28, 2008

GeoCouch: Geospatial queries with CouchDB. Interesting approach: uses “external2â€?, a branch that allows external services to be called from CouchDB. SQLite’s SpatiaLite extension is then used as an external spacial index.

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A Million-user Comet Application with Mochiweb, Part 1

Simon Willison - Simon Willison - October 16, 2008

A Million-user Comet Application with Mochiweb, Part 1. Richard Jones explores Mochiweb, Erlang and linux kernel tuning for building a high performance comet server. Does this mean real-time web features are coming to last.fm?

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Reia

Simon Willison - Simon Willison - September 25, 2008

Reia. The most common complaint I see about Erlang is the syntax. Reia is a Python-style scripting language (with a dash of Ruby) that runs on the Erlang virtual machine. Looks promising.

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Engineering @ Facebook: Facebook Chat

Simon Willison - Simon Willison - May 15, 2008

Engineering @ Facebook: Facebook Chat. The new Facebook Chat uses Comet (long polling with a hidden iframe) against a custom web / chat server written in Erlang, designed to handle a launch to all 70 million users at once. It was tested using a “dark…

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A quote from Damien Katz

Simon Willison - Simon Willison - April 14, 2008

Once you reach a certain level of activity in the system where the garbage collector can no longer keep up (and it will happen), then every line of code in your system is now a potential failure point that can leave the whole program in…

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