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.

Comments

Posting to FaceBook feed using Graph API

Graph API was announced at F8 with a promise to dramatically simplify the FB API. I checked the read access over the new interface during the presentations and to my big surprise it worked flawlessly and from the first time. When I tried https://graph.facebook.com/facebook , JSON-formatted info about the FaceBook page was returned (as expected). Then I tried OAuth 2.0 way of accessing the API to post a message to the feed. And to my even bigger surprise it worked too! Here is what you need to do to access Graph API over OAuth: 1. Create a FB app, store app properties to a file: $appkey = '7925873fbfb5347e571744515a9d2804' ; $appsecret = 'THE SECRET' ; $canvas = 'http://apps.facebook.com/graphapi/' ; 2. Create a page that will prompt user the access permission (I am prompting for the publish_stream and offline_access permissions at the same time) //http://apps.facebook.com/graphapi/ require 'settings.php' ; $url = "https://graph.face...

Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) and PHP

This morning Amazon announced availability of a bulk email delivery service called " Simple Email Service ". Anyone who knows how much pain is it to set-up scalable email solution (and it is not just spammers who need it!) should celebrate the occasion. I know of a company that spent several years cleaning ip addresses it sends email and found itself locked into the contract with internet provider since it would take forever to reach required level of email deliver ability anywhere else. Anyway, this evening I decided to check the Amazon claim that the service is "simple". Found out that it is indeed simple! Since there is not much in terms of the documentation yet, here is my code where I used AWS PHP library : // Enable full-blown error reporting. http://twitter.com/rasmus/status/7448448829 error_reporting (- 1 ); // Set plain text headers header ( "Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8" ); // Include the SDK require_once '../sdk.class.php' ...

Respect Coin

Respect I think it's time to talk about currency. Let's create a Respect Coin. Step 1. Install OpenZeppelin library npm install zeppelin-solidity When it comes to coins, I like to use some functions that smart people already implemented and other smart people verified. I think that Zeppelin is a nice collection of Solidity contracts that can be trusted. Let's use the StandardToken contract and use it as a parent class for our own RespectCoin contract. Step 2. Create RespectCoin contract and store it in "contracts/RespectCoin.sol" file pragma solidity ^0.4.4; import "../node_modules/zeppelin-solidity/contracts/token/StandardToken.sol"; /** * @title RespectCoin * @dev ERC20 Token example, where all tokens are pre-assigned to th e creator. * Note they can later distribute these tokens as they wish using `transfer` and other * `StandardToken` functions. */ contract RespectCoin is StandardToken { string public constant name = ...

Afterweb

Search This Blog