tornado

In this post I will look synchronous vs asynchronous programming with Ruby's EventMachine, to show that asynchronous does not always mean that your code will run faster. In part 1 of this series on Ruby's EventMachine I discussed the benefits of event-based programming in general. I am a big fan of event-based programming, as you will see in these posts, but I wanted to flip the coin over and look at one of the down-sides of event-based programming.

In this first post, of a series on Ruby's EventMachine, I will introduce EventMachine and explain why event-based programming is good for your wallet. EventMachine, which just turned 1.0.0 this week, is more than just a gem, it is a new paradigm for many Ruby programmers and is not always easy to just drop into your existing stack. As the name suggests, it gives you event-based programming.

Remember, Startup Weekend equates to about 21 hours of development time and that includes brainstorming, planning, talking to mentors, other meetings, eating and a bit of fun. Also, skill-sets between developers do not always line up. The key phrase is “ship it!” whether it is good, bad, ugly or broken. The clock is ticking.

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 delve into the snippets of information available on Quora and look at Quora from a technical perspective. What technical decisions have they made? What does their architecture look like? What languages and frameworks do they use? How do they make that search bar respond so quickly?