team.onesite.com blog listings.

mobile land

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 17:32:31 -0500

Ive been spending a fair amount of time off in nosql land testing and writing c drivers lately and also comparing protobuffers to thrift, but its looking like its time to jump back into mobile and add some new flair with sdk 4.0 and froyo both available now. any new features people want to see hop over to static and let us know

0 Comments - Leave a Comment

Scribe and Logging

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 18:27:12 -0500

At ONEsite, we've utiltized several open source tools to solve big problems. Scribe is a tool originally developed by Facebook and then open sourced. From their description, they have over 100 use cases (though they're not specified). We don't have 100 use cases for it yet, but the number is growing as it's a very simple, fast, and convenient tool.

Scribe is a scalable, fault tolerant logging framework built on Thrift (another Facebook technology). If you have 10 web servers and 10 database servers all logging information all the time, it becomes difficult to search those logs. Scribe allows you to send all that information to one place.

A client application supplies a message to be logged, and which category to log it to. The client application sends it over the Thrift protocol to the Scribe Client server hosted on the machine. The Scribe Client server then sends the message to the Scribe Master server.

If the Scribe Master is down, then messages are automatically logged locally by the Scribe Client server until the Master server begins taking connections again.

For some of our implementations, we have a second backup logger that will do basic file writes to ensure all logs are captured in the event the Scribe Client is down.

Scribe has come in handy in many cases. We use it for logging raw traffic, user events, contest entries, web service details, and more. We even use it for debugging issues that span across several production servers.

Having all logs dependable and centralized opens the doors for many great possiblities, I'll talk about some of those next time.

0 Comments - Leave a Comment

Web Hosting Trends

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 13:18:21 -0500

I have been doing some research lately on poplular search terms using Google Insights for Search and found it interesting that the amount of people who search for web hosting or domain registration related keywords is down significantly since 2004.

It is interesting but not too much of a surprise. These days people are searching for more specific application hosting. For example, the number of people who searched for "wordpress hosting" is up significantly over that same timeframe.

This indicates to me that even though web hosting behind the scenes has remained relatively unchanged (you still need web servers, databases, connectivity, etc.) the front side has changed significantly. People are no longer searching for web hosting and then trying to figure out how to write html and put together a decent looking site. Application hosting allows them to sign up and then use plugins and themes to have a professional looking; fully functioning website in no time

As a web host and an application provider we have to stay on top of these trends and try to bring to the market what it wants even if it doesn't know that it wants it yet.

0 Comments - Leave a Comment

Forever Forward: Browser Updates and Codec Wars

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:43:51 -0500

H.264 video compression wow! HD movies in a small streaming package - loved it. And just when I start embedding movies compressed with this Flash8+ compatible codec, I find out it isn't royalty free! "It is owned by the MPEG-LA consortium, which doesn’t charge royalties for its use today, but currently plans to start enforcing royalties in 2015"_ref

Okay... time to move everyone. Who wouldn't? Capitalize on your dev team developing a knock-out codec in exhaustive ways, but royalties on a compression method that you've already allowed the public to rely on? What??!? Not going to work.

Okay, so what's next for embedding videos then?

Will need to look into

1. Browser compatibility; HTML5 is around the corner too (side-note.. time to do the browser upgrade dance again)

2. Competing royalty-free video codecs

3. Friendly for the iPhone (it was a gift ;) )

**********************************************

So VP8's creators were bought by Google and has been made Open Source (and royalty-free) as part of Google's new Web-M platform. Another Free SDK...

Currently: H.264 vs Ogg Thedora

Upcoming: H.264 vs VP8 vs Ogg Thedora & HTML5 Video vs Flash Video

Okay, dunno if the last one is very exciting to me. Flash video was great for a time, but I think as a video container it is losing to HTML5. Not the death of Flash mind you, but I think it's about the video codec here anyway. At least for my purposes :)

Oh and Browser wars!

Whoa! Hold the Phone! MSIE closes the gap?!?! After how many years?

(at least according to them and a few other benchmarks)

And, interestingly, a bit more info at-a-glance about common subprocesses browsers go through from a MS study:

REF:

blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2009/11/18/a...

news.downloadatoz.com/ie9-faster-than-fi...

Chrome, Opera, and Safari are javascript eatin' machines I guess! But how will MSIE fare on the other benchmarks. Here is an interesting table that had not tested MSIE9:

Web Browser Grand Prix: The Top Five, Tested And Ranked

Category / Test	Overall Winner
Startup Times	Opera
Memory Usage	Firefox
Page Load Times	Firefox
HTML	Safari
CSS	Safari
Tables	Safari
JavaScript	Chrome
PeaceKeeper	Opera
Acid3	Chrome
DOM	Chrome
Flash	Opera
Java	Opera
SilverLight	Firefox / Internet Explorer

This was posted with Safari 5 which wasn't benchmarked either. Ahh it never ends. :)

0 Comments - Leave a Comment

Widgets and Beyond

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 08:14:10 -0500

ONEsite has been creating widgets for several years now. While each version of our widgets have served their purpose, our community sites, along with the clients that utilize them, have grown in complexity over the years. What used to be a simple javascript include that displayed a static list of blog posts without any interactive features has become too outdated in our new world of interactive websites.

Introduce widgets 2.0! About two years ago we deployed our second widget system. Goals for this system included the ability to interact with widgets (AJAX style), simpler include syntax, and more consistency among our array of available widgets. This system has made available interactive widgets for a couple of years now on some very active websites, providing social interactivity for some of our leading clients. Through our use of JSONP we were able to request data from our servers providing actions such as pagination, posting of comments, and favoriting content on an external site, thus breaking through the cross-domain barrier that plagues normal AJAX.

While this second widget system has served us well, there have been a few shortcomings. The first involves starting sessions on Safari and Chrome browsers. Both of these browsers by default restrict the ability for third-party scripts to set cookies, thus requiring us to do an entire page redirect to set the necessary cookies when starting a session. We have also discovered a nasty tendency of rewriting several of our existing bits of functionality just to turn them into widgets. Should there not be a way to deploy one piece of functionality that works both on an internal page as well as a widget?

These problems, among others, have led us to begin architecting our third widget system. Our features, along with the way users interact with them, have become more and more complex. Some of our goals include:

Prevent Safari/Chrome browser redirect when initializing session.
Updated architecture to allow new functionality to be deployed both on our communities, and as widgets.
Ability to dynamically load widgets as needed.
Social login and integration with other communities (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

In an increasingly dynamic world of websites, we are prepared to distribute our social components and data to any site wishing to use them. Whether it's displaying the hottest content, providing chat for our client's users, or enabling full-featured interactive discussions, we will provide all of this functionality and more for ONEsite clients.

Stay tuned for more!

0 Comments - Leave a Comment