September 10th, 2008 chris
Distributed systems are an inherently tricky field. There are a million different problems that arise in distributed systems that don’t show up in concurrent systems on one CPU, which is why I find it to be so interesting. But this isn’t a rant about distributed systems. This is about a technology mentioned for a few pages in the Pickaxe book called SOAP, the Simple Object Access Protocol. It’s been a breeze to use so far (granted, my app isn’t that complicated yet), and much easier to get going than CORBA in Java (although I’m not sure if that’s a CORBA thing, a Java thing, or something else).
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Posted in Ruby, UCSB Projects, Web Apps | No Comments »
August 29th, 2008 chris
After getting through Agile Development with Rails, I wasn’t quite ready to get AppDrop working on my server. I didn’t know how to use nginx, mongrel, and all the other neat deployment tools that Rails is becoming associated with. So I picked up Deploying Rails Applications to learn all about the fun stuff involved.
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August 8th, 2008 chris
My relationship with Ruby is oddly erratic. The first time I tried to learn it, it just looked like Perl but a little more pleasant on the eyes. It just didn’t click for me.
This time around was totally different. I’m trying to get an interesting Rails app, AppDrop, working on our servers at school. But as I don’t really know Rails, I checked out Agile Web Development with Rails, 2nd Edition. And boy did I pick just the right book for learning Rails.
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Posted in Book of the Week, Programming, Rails, Web Apps | 1 Comment »
June 25th, 2008 chris
So it seems all the buzz in the distributed computing world is all about the magical realm of “Cloud Computing”. Everyone seems to have a different definition of what Cloud Computing is though, so for the purposes of this post, we’ll define it as follows:
Cloud Computing: Doing important work using resources that do not physically belong to you.
This definition is just vague enough to encapsulate the various “areas” of cloud computing that people talk about and just precise enough to note that the resources you use here tend to be virtualized in data centers (or even in virtual data centers).
Now that we’ve got the necessities out of the way, let’s look at a few providers of Cloud Computing services: Amazon, 3tera, RightScale, and Google.
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