semanticpool

Starling

• Starling is a light-weight persistent queue server that speaks the MemCache protocol. It was built to drive Twitter’s backend, and is in production across Twitter’s cluster.

Erlang

• general-purpose concurrent programming language and runtime system [...]
• Erlang is used in several large telecommunication systems from Ericsson. [...]
• terminate every expression with a DOT followed by a whitespace! [...]
• Example:
  • -module(test).
    -export([fac/1]).
    fac(0) -> 1;
    fac(N) -> N * fac(N-1).
• JSON and JSON-RPC for Erlang

Virtual Earth Development

• Virtual Earth Interactive SDK
• Virtual Earth examples at viavirtualearth.com

Multiple hosts for assets in Rails

• One other quick win Rails 2.0 will give you is multiple hosts for assets. Browsers will only have two concurrent connections open for any single host, but an easy way around that is to use multiple subdomains that resolve to the same domain. [...]
• config.action_controller.asset_host = ‘assets%d.YOUR_DOMAIN.com’
• Now, if your page has lots and lots of assets (javascript includes, linked stylesheets, images, and so forth) page download times will decrease when you’re able to fool the browser into thinking it’s talking to multiple hosts (which, again, get 2 concurrent requests each), while it is in fact only talking to a single host. [...]

Google Data

• GData is a new protocol based on the Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0 syndication formats, plus the Atom Publishing Protocol. [...]
• All sorts of services can provide GData feeds, from public services like blog feeds or news syndication feeds to personalized data like email or calendar events or task-list items. [...]
• GData provides a general model for feeds, queries, and results. You can use it to send queries and updates to any service that has a GData interface. [...]
• Google Data API Supports JSON [...]

Microsoft Photosynth & Photo Tourism

• PhotoSynth is the first prototype to come out of the new Microsoft Live Labs and is a great example of cool technologies made possible by corporate largess. [...]
• Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. [...]
• takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next. [...]
• access gigabytes of photos in seconds [...]
• Supported Operating Systems: Windows XP [...]

• Photo Tourism is a system for browsing large collections of photographs in 3D. [...]
• Our photo explorer interface enables the viewer to interactively move about the 3D space by seamlessly transitioning between photographs, based on user control. [...]

Facebook Developer Application

• allows for easy access to application settings all within the Facebook environment [...]
• standards-based web service with methods for accessing and contributing Facebook data [...]
• uses a REST-based interface [...]
  • Representational State Transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture for distributed hypermedia systems such as the World Wide Web [...]
• In order for a Facebook API client to use the API, the user of the client application must be logged in to Facebook [...]
• RFacebook (formerly RBook): a Ruby Client for Facebook API 1.0+ [...]
• FBML – Facebook Markup Language [...]
• FQL – Facebook Query Language [...]

XML-RPC and Apache XML-RPC

• It’s a spec and a set of implementations that allow software running on disparate operating systems, running in different environments to make procedure calls over the Internet [...]
• It’s remote procedure calling using HTTP as the transport and XML as the encoding. XML-RPC is designed to be as simple as possible, while allowing complex data structures to be transmitted, processed and returned [...]
• some people still prefer XML-RPC to SOAP because of its simplicity, minimalism and ease of use [...]
• An XML-RPC message is an HTTP-POST request. The body of the request is in XML. A procedure executes on the server and the value it returns is also formatted in XML. [...]
• SOAP is very similar to XML-RPC. It, too, works by marshaling procedure calls over HTTP as XML documents. Unfortunately, SOAP appears to be suffering from specification creep. [...]
• Procedure parameters can be scalars, numbers, strings, dates, etc.; and can also be complex record and list structures. [...]

• Apache XML-RPC is a Java implementation of XML-RPC [...]

Microsoft Silverlight

• Microsoft® SilverlightTM is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. (more…)
• Microsoft Silverlight (code-named Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere or WPF/E) is a proprietary dual-platform XAML-based WPF technology for video, vector graphics, and animations. (more…)
• similar to Adobe Flash
• Microsoft Silverlight to Support IronRuby (more…)
• Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML, pronounced zammel ([zæ:m?l])) by Microsoft is a declarative XML-based vector graphics markup language used to initialize structured values and objects (more…)
• The goal of Silverlight is to get into the game, not to add anything new of value. If you look at the feature set on a pure technology basis, Silverlight has 80% less features and 98% less compatibility than Adobe Flash Player. (more…)
• In the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha release, we have enabled streamed XML reading and writing through the XmlReader and XmlWriter, respectively. (more…)