In this blog post I'll go through an example, in repeatable steps, of how to get up and running with the Tornado chat demo on ActiveState's public sandbox for Stackato. ActiveState's Stackato PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) is based on VMware's open-source PaaS, Cloud Foundry, and offers an enterprise PaaS solution that will run on any public cloud, private cloud, laptop or desktop.
In this post I will look at the technology infrastructure behind Summify.com, a website that strives to make our lives easier and helps us deal with the information overload we all experience every time we sit down at our computers. Summify has aggregated over 200 million stories from the web and serves them up on-demand through a series of different mediums. The website uses Tornado to push real-time updates out to the users and they have developed over a dozen backend systems, some of which I will cover in this blog post.
In this blog post I will introduce SQLShell and demonstrate, step-by-step, how to install it and start using it with MySQL. I will also reflect on the possibilites of using this with NoSQL technologies, such as HBase, MongoDB, Hive, CouchDB, Redis and Google BigQuery. SQLShell is a cross-platform, cross-database command-line tool for SQL, much like psql for PostgreSQL or the mysql command-line tool for MySQL.
This is demonstration of installing Homebrew, the new Mac OS X package installer. Step-by-step instructions on installing Homebrew and using the brew command.
There are data sources out there, but which data source you choose depends on which technology you wish to get experience working with. The experience should be of the technologies you are using, rather than what the data is. Certain datasets pair better with certain technologies. Simulating the data can be another approach. You just need a clever way of generating and randomizing your fake data. Thirdly, you can use a hybrid approach. Take real data and replay it on a loop, randomizing it as it goes through. Simulating the Twitter fire-hose should not be too hard, should it?