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Fun Stuff at OSCON 2005
from the roundup dept.
Mike Shaver's talk on writing Firefox extensions was packed to the walls. If you've been wanting to try it, Firefox 1.5 makes development easier, and should be out soon, so now's a good time. This talk and the tutorial on Ajax persuaded me to start using the DOM Inspector and debugging some JavaScript to get a better understanding of webpage manipulation.
Aaron Boodman's talk on his extension Greasemonkey was a walkthrough of writing a simple GM user script, a discussion of what's coming up, and some Q&A. Greasemonkey 0.5 ("Now With Security!") is in beta: there are multiple security changes that suggest someone really has sat down and thought the whole model through. GM works with Firefox, Seamonkey, Opera, and Windows MSIE (but not, oh please somebody correct this oversight, Safari).
Ruby on Rails is hot; if you want to develop a web app quickly you can't ignore it. It stresses "convention over configuration" with reasonable defaults. The tutorial went from installation to the "hello world" of the web, a blog (!), in a few hours. Anyone have a real-world example of Rails scaling to a large project and lots of traffic?
DarwinBuild is an open-source project from Apple that aids in building the open-source components of Darwin/Mac OS X. Given a build number of Mac OS X, it will fetch and build the software for that version, allowing you to modify the source as needed, making it easy for any developer to modify everything from the kernel to various utilities (just remember to reapply the modifications after running Software Update, if necessary). You can read more about it from, in addition to the web site, the presentation slides.
Google and O'Reilly gave out the 2005 open source awards, with $5000 attached to each. Congratulations to the winners.
Tony Baxter's Shtoom is a cross-platform VoIP client and software framework, written in Python, for writing your own phone applications.
Novell is still moving its employees from Windows to Linux, which we first heard at last year's OSCON. The migration from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice is complete, and the big step, from Windows to Linux, is 50% complete, projected to be 80% by November. Miguel de Icaza gave flashy demos of some Linux desktop applications that didn't impress this cynical observer very much.
PlaceSite is an open-source project looking to bring physical proximity awareness to Internet access at coffeeshops and other meetingplaces: think "local-only Friendster" and you're not far off. They got feedback from a monthlong trial earlier this year and are working on a new version that will be easy to deploy. Could be neat.
In a great 2-hour session on Wednesday, we got to hear from representatives of four leading open source databases about what they've been working on lately. Here are the summaries...
Ingres r3 has an impressive list of big features. Ingres was just open-sourced by Computer Associates this summer, and it's gotten a lot of attention for being a full-featured enterprise database. Ingres supports table partitioning that can be either range-based or hash-based, which can greatly improve performance in many cases. Its optimizer can now come up with parallel execution plans, which can be useful even on single-CPU machines and non-partitioned tables. There's also federated data storage (one can access data stored in another RDBMS through Ingres) and replication. And they're working on a concurrent access cluster, to allow data to be manipulated not just by multiple threads on one machine, but multiple machines.
A side note: Computer Associates was invited by O'Reilly to talk about its recently open-sourcing Ingres. Its representative, while confessing that introducing a new license was "probably the wrong thing to do," said that other licenses wouldn't have worked for them (the GPL "was seen as viral"). The one question that the audience had time to ask was "is Ingres a dump" -- is CA making it open-source to transfer the responsibility of support from the company to the community? The three-part "no" answer was that there are more CA developers working on Ingres now, that Ingres is at the core of their new releases, and that they've sponsored a "million-dollar challenge" to foster community interest. Time will tell I guess.
Firebird 2.0 has been in alpha since January and a beta is expected soon. Since 2000 much of their development has been aimed at making the product easy to install, and making the code easy for a distributed group of developers to work on. This year they're building features on that groundwork. Their design includes 2-phase commits (since the beginning), cooperative garbage collection (as a transaction encounters unneeded data, it removes it) and self-balancing indexes. Backup has been improved. When 2.0 gets to beta, I'm going to check this out, it sounds like very interesting technology (and apparently it will install with four clicks!).
MySQL 5.0 is in beta, and has been feature-frozen since April. Back in 4.1, its abstracted table-type has been put to advantage with odd engines like Archive (only insert, no update); Blackhole for fast replication; and an improvement to MyISAM for logging (allowing concurrent selects with inserts-at-table-end). Their Connector/MXJ lets you run a native MySQL server embedded inside a Java application. In 5.0 we're seeing stored procedures per the SQL:2003 standard, triggers, updatable views, XA (distribution transaction), SAP R/3 compatible server side cursors, fast precision math, a federated storage engine, a greedy optimizer for better handling of many-table joins, and an optional "strict mode" to turn some of MySQL's friendly nonstandard warnings into compliant errors. And they're working on partitioning, ODBC, and letting MySQL Cluster's non-indexed columns to be stored on disk.
PostgreSQL 8.1 is expected to be released in November or December, after a feature-freeze in July -- and it's an impressive list of new features. Their optimizer will make use of multiple indexes when appropriate, which is pretty darn exciting. The recommendation will be that in most cases it will be most efficient to have only single-column indexes and let the optimizer figure out which combination to use. They're implementing a 2-phase commit, they're bringing the automatic vacuum into the core code, and they removed a global shared buffer lock so they're now getting "almost linear" SMP performance scaling. I've never felt the need for Postgres, but I'm definitely going to look at 8.1.
What everybody missed: (Score:2)
He looks awfully cheery for having no body and a set of crap headphones, doesn't he?
I know i'll get modded down for this, but ontopic: That Darwinbuild stuff looks pretty handy for say, upgrades in time without having to wait for Apple to stream then in via OS updates like th
RoR large scale? (Score:4, Informative)
While theres no sites i know off with massive traffic that run rails, theres a few large projects. TextDrive [textdrive.com] run StrongSpace [strongspace.com] which is basiclly online storage using SFTP and RoR. Also theres a few from the creators of RoR, BaseCamp [basecamphq.com], BackPack [backpackit.com]...
Re:RoR large scale? (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/43_Things [wikipedia.org]
http://www.43places.com/ [43places.com]
Re:RoR large scale? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are several significant downsides to using Ruby on Rails.
Firstly, the way that ActiveRecord works by default - generating classes at run-time based on database tables - is considered by many (well, me at least!) to be a very backward step, as it makes code vunerable to changes in those tables, and also makes portability of code between different databases non-trivial. There are far better ways to do this - the Python ORM Dejavu (in in which the data model is expressed as classes) is an example. Almost all modern development languages work this way - with the exception of RoR!
Secondly, Ruby is slow. There may be future JIT systems that help deal with this, but they are not there yet.
Thirdly, Ruby is changing, and it is likely (from what I read) that the next version will not be fully compatible, so any major project developed now in Rails will have upgrading issues.
So Ruby on Rails is very far from a silver bullet. It may a neat way to get small (in terms of code) websites up quickly.
Parent
Re:RoR large scale? (Score:5, Insightful)
-1, Troll. Please. There are people running real, large-scale web sites on Ruby-on-Rails. Tobias just named several.
This has no relevance to whether or not Ruby on Rails is a fundamentally good design for long-term support and growth of any given software project. We all know that poor designs have been used in large projects!
The issue of database-dependence is a real and important one, and should not be trivially dismissed as 'trolling'. The idea of working dynamically from database tables is great for getting things up and running fast, but is not great for long term use, as at some future date the database may need to be modified or shared with other applications. The changes that result may break existing Ruby on Rails applications. More mature ORM systems have a mapping layer that can help isolate code from such changes. By abandoning that layer as the default setup, Ruby on Rails loses (in my view) an important feature.
Parent
Desktop didn't impress cynical observer (Score:4, Interesting)
MySQL w/ XA (Score:3, Informative)
Re:MySQL w/ XA (Score:3, Insightful)
They had a nice niche with the small developer, where they worked out cheaper (maybe 1 or 2 clients in-house) plus they had the hobbyist/GPL market of course but going for the bigger market is going to backfire on them unless they change their pricing stru
Re:MySQL w/ XA (Score:4, Informative)
Thanks!
Parent
Re:MySQL w/ XA (Score:4, Insightful)
XA support has been committed into the upcomming PostgreSQL release and is already supported by Firebird. Considering their licensing, both are better choices.
Parent
Re:MySQL w/ XA (Score:3, Informative)
We provide XA both via SQL and the JDBC driver currently.
Ruby On Rails (Score:3, Informative)
Been playing around with it for a while now, there's a fair few sites using it
Plus the (small) site I'm working on for a friend Slap My Belly [slapmybelly.com]
my brother attended and blogged it (Score:4, Informative)
Ruby on Rails (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ruby on Rails (Score:3, Informative)
It takes a little work to get from some of the simplistic tutorials on the web to larger-scale apps, especially if you are working with an existing database schema as I was. However, I've found that RoR really offers huge productivity gains.
Compared to the J2EE project I was working on, where I was evaluating persistence frameworks, J2EE vs. Spring IoC for the business logic, presentation/templ
Re:Ruby on Rails (Score:3, Insightful)
I was there... (Score:5, Informative)
...and blogged the conference, some of the more interesting bits below,
Amazing conference, if you weren't there, you should have been...
Al.CA doesn't get it re: GPL and "viral" (Score:3, Interesting)
What a disappointing response by the CA representative. Can CA really be that clueless, since a simple Google search on "GPL viral" will find plenty of information (including past articles on /.) that show the GPL is NOT viral? Or is CA just pushing that FUD for some other reason? I don't know, but it's disappointing to see them resort to that tired excuse for their actions.
If you use a GPL'ed database tool, the GPL does not come into play with regard to your software, any more than using the GIMP to create a picture doesn't GPL your software in the process. The GPL comes into play if you were to grab some GPL code and put it into your software product, and then you release the result as your own product under a different licensing scheme. You are then given a choice: Release it under the GPL or not release that code. There is always a third option: Don't take someone else's code without honoring its license terms in the first place. Write it yourself, if you want to release under a different license.
But none of this applies to using a DB program. The GPL isn't viral in the first place, and it certainly doesn't apply to the end-user use of a software package.
Re:CA doesn't get it re: GPL and "viral" (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this exactly what CA has done?
Re:CA doesn't get it re: GPL and "viral" (Score:3, Interesting)
No, I think the CA stand in the exhibit hall made it very clear that CA just "doesn't get it", they were treating OSCON like a normal industry trade show rather than trying to sell themselves technically, which is pretty much the only way to do it at OSCON.
Of course, if their exhibit hall stand didn't show it, their awful keynote [babilim.co.uk] talk surely did...
Al.Re:CA doesn't get it re: GPL and "viral" (Score:3, Informative)
Viral means you get infected whether you take action or not. Someone coughs and next thing you know you get sick. But the only way you get to the stage where you face the choice I describe is if you take deliberate steps to appropriate some GPL code into your own product, combined with the next deliberate step to release the new product, combined with the next deliberat
I question Novell's 100% switch away from Office (Score:3, Interesting)
Further, he indicated that they were not going to be forced to switch. I wonder if that 100% change that Miguel indicated was for the technical and support staff only.
Anyhow, I decided to download and try out NLD when I got back from the conference. It failed to recognize my monitor (19" Dell flat panel with DVI interface) and sound didn't work even though it recognized the card. On recommendation from a friend, I tried Ubuntu the other night and it worked with everything (except the printer needs some driver change to work which I haven't done yet).
Ingres (Score:4, Informative)
OSCON Aggregator (Score:3, Informative)
PostgreSQL is not slowing down. (Score:4, Interesting)
The things in the works for 8.1 and 8.2 are looking very interesting indeed. Besides 2-phase commit and bitmap indexes:
- Full multi-master replication with Slony 2 (Slony 1 is single-master)
- IN/OUT paramater declaration for more flexibility in functions (making PL/PgSQL even more like PL/SQL)
- Much more useable and flexible custom datatype creation. "Complex" dataypes may not seem too useful for standard business databases, but they have all sorts of applications in areas like mapping, engineering, scientific analysis, etc... (Not to mention which, you might even want to think in terms of mapping custom datatypes to classes in your applications.)
- Horizontal partitioning: this is a concept used in very large tables, where you might want different groups of rows from one table stored in different locations, such as different physical disks, SANs, etc... This sort of thing is actually already being done informally by leveraging PostgreSQL's table inheritance features and tablespaces, but in the future (8.2 or 8.3?) it should become a standard feature.
Speaking of which, how many people caught Josh Berkus and Joe Conway's talk on "Terabytes of Business Intelligence"? Very interesting insights on how to handle very large databases in PostgreSQL. For example, Joe Conway's project gathers statistics from industrial equipment around the world, receiving several GB a day of data on the central server, an 8-CPU XEON, storing the data on a SAN array via NFS mount configured for jumbo frames. To handle the super-large main table, he created a partitioning schema where there are 12 sub-tables, each holding the data for one month of the year, and then creating a main table via inheritance [postgresql.org] from these tables to present a unified relation of all this data. In some ways this may sound like a view from a UNION query, but the implementation has much better performance and maintenance implications.
All this means PostgreSQL is steadily gaining ground on the Big 3 database vendors, and in some ways surpassing them, as far as the quality of the implementation. Many of the distinctions now are in external areas, such as application servers and federated systems. (You can do either of these things in PostgreSQL, but there is no official standardized method)
We all know that the main DB vendors don't allow anyone to publish benchmarks without permission, so of course there are no easily accessible benchmarks between PostgreSQL and Oracle, for instance. But, in informal talks at OSCON, I found at least a couple companies who had done their own internal benchmarks and PostgreSQL came out ahead surprisingly often.