mercurycomplex

Amazon Launched CloudFront yesterday

CloudFront is a content delivery service that works closely with S3 to make public objects in your account available through a distribution network with edge locations in the US, Europe and Asia.

from James Murty, author of Programming Amazon Web Services has a post outlining the features available CloudFront.

Unfortunately there are no Australian servers.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss has started the process of defining the features we will set in the next major version of Django.

• Feature List Voting
• Feature List

The features I'm hoping that make it into 1.1 are;

1. ORM Aggregation Support (ORM-01) - Would reduce the amount of SQL I have to write considerable (The ORM already does a good job at minimising the need for SQL, but this would be the icing on the cake).
2. Batch Editing in the Admin (Admin-01) - Make mass edits achievable in the admin interface with little additional code.
3. Class based generic views (View-01) - Just seems logically.

In other Django news:

• Profiling Django Applications with kcachegrind
• Why the URL template tag sucks

Move over AJAX as the industry buzzword, Cloud Computing is here.

All the major players are contributing to the future of cloud computer in various ways. Microsoft with Azure, Google with Google App Engine, and Amazon with Amazon Web Services, but I don't believe that people are really giving enough credit to the contributions that Facebook, Yahoo and Apache are playing in the future of server infrastructure.

Thrift, Hardoop, ActiveMQ, CouchDB are all great open source products which provide the software infrastructure to establish your own architecture.

"Hold on", your thinking, "I thought that Cloud Computing incorporates Software as a Service (SaaS)". Ok so the software I mentioned above isn't available as a Software as a Service but that doesn't mean that it isn't going to play an important part in web infrastructure.

The major reasons to use web services infrastructure provided by the likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft are the following;

1. Cost Effectiveness
2. Dependability

While the only one of the three major players to offer the customizability is Amazon. The other two providers provide you with a defined feature set that your software must adhere too.

The benefits of rolling my own document orientated database (Couchdb) then using that provided by Amazon or Google are the same benefits you get when you adopt any open source software. With the open source solutions above you have the opportunity to customise the software to your projects needs if they don't meet certain criteria.

That doesn't mean that you should not adopt any of the solutions provided by Google, Amazon or Microsoft. All I'm saying is that with these services there comes a cost. My next post will actually be about using one of the services provided by Amazon. Go figure.

I have just released a plugin for lighttpd, to concatenate CSS/Javascript files together to reduce the number of requests made to the server (and hopefully minimize page load time). This plugin is based on mod_concat for Apache which in turn was initially thought of by David Davis at Vox and reimplemented in perlbal.

The plugin is available on Google Code. I still need to get around to adding documentation.

The main difference between the Apache implementation and my implementation for lighttpd is that mine requires a whitelist of file extension

concat.include_ext   = (".css", ".js")
   

More information:

• Apache mod_concat
• Article on concatenating file requests
• Alternative lighttpd solution

Any feedback or comments feel free to email me via john.dagostino at gmail

Simon Willison has released a new application for managing schema migrations in Django applications. The new application dmigrations, is currently only available for mySQL although the code has been structured to allow for other database back ends.

The tutorial available online runs through the process of using dmigrations in your own projects