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Vampire post-mortum on how to create TV-scale applications

Had fine time yesterday watching MTV's Deadliest Warrior on big TV screen and Loyalize's servers on my laptop screen crunching numbers from users' vote during the show. Personally, I have more passion for software then for Zombies or Vampires, so I found it to be much more fun watching my laptop screen then TV. What struck me is that just a few years back, numbers that I saw on my laptop will be if not impossible but extremely difficult to achieve. So, I am glad to report, that common (open source) technology is finally is at the level that it allows a relatively small team of good engineers to write an application that works for TV-audience scale.

What worked for us is the combination of:

Of cause, it's a lot of work to make them work together in scalable and reliable fashion but, at least, finally, we do not need to mix sand and clay to make bricks first if we want to build a house - all bricks are are readily available for download.

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