Tzetze Fly

Amazon is in a very giving mood this Christmas. They’ve added a new service to their stable of web services, and this is the big one everyone’s been waiting for - Amazon SimpleDB. This is a MAJOR inflection point in web development.

Look - this is beta, it might not work, it might not scale, etc, etc, but Amazon has shown a great track record with their web services (AWS) thus far. First was S3 - storage on demand. Next was EC2 - computing on demand. Lately they’ve added FPS - a flexible payment service, and they’ve had SQS - simple queue service - for a while now. Major sites are running one or more of these services in production right now, sites like New York Times and SmugMug. I even read somewhere that Microsoft is using S3 for storage on one of their sites.

SimpleDB sounds very similar to the CouchDB project I’ve covered in the past. It’s a schema-less data repository of name-value pairs with automatic indexing. It scales instantly, it’s pay per use, and it looks like it uses an API based on REST. Initial commentary indicates it’s using Erlang to accomplish this. More details regarding the API, performance, etc, will come out over the next few weeks as people start to exercise this.

I spend more and more of my time procuring equipement, retro-fitting equipment, dealing with power, cooling, and space issues, budgeting for neeeded equipment, estimating expenditures on future equipment - less and less time building cool stuff. Being able to get up and running in a day on these new services, trying out ideas at low cost, then tossing away bad products or expanding successful products - that’s the future - and it’s all coming into focus right now.

From my point of view, all Amazon is missing now is a proper load-balancing service. I’m guessing that is on tap for them in 2008. If they go the extra mile and make that load-balancer allow geo-graphical distribution of traffic to unique data centers, that would push this stuff into a whole other stratosphere.

Had sushi last night at Tao with John Hensley from FNRES and Mike Wurzer from FBS. These guys are such high quality, smart people and just a pleasure to be around. I always learn more in these dinner discussions than I do in three days around the show floor. If you go, make sure to try the white tuna - it was insanely good!

We had a great discussion about web services and Sam Ruby’s great new book “RESTful Web Services”. (I’m hoping to provide a book report here on this soon.) Seems like every time I read a book or article and can’t wait to refer Wurzer to it, he’s already on it. Of course, lot’s of discussion on RETS too. Later Hensley provided current insight into one of my other favorite topics - Orange County real estate.

We had a couple of groups come by to say hi, and it struck me that the projects the three of us are working on are probably affecting the daily work of 90% of the Realtors out there. That’s pretty heavy.

I’m off to the CRT sponsored lunch right now, which should be interesting. I understand 140 people are expected.

I’m doing a lot of reading right now about feed protocols like Atom. Google basically uses Atom to provide feeds for all their data sources, but they add a query component to it and call it GData. Man - this stuff is powerful, yet super easy to use. I guess that description pretty much sums up everything Google does.

An Atom feed is an XML standard that is very easy to parse/consume, either using straight XPath or with a language specific toolkit. In Ruby, I currently use FeedTools. Most browsers (I have tried Firefox and Safari) are able to display an Atom feed in a pleasant way, so you can enter the sample urls below right into them and see the results.

The parameters on these urls should be very self explanatory. Feel free to try different values, like changing the city name to your city.

Show videos on YouTube for homes for sale in Boca Raton:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/videos?vq=home+for+sale+boca+raton&max-results=20

Show listings on Google Base for homes for sale in Boca Raton:

http://www.google.com/base/feeds/snippets?bq=home+for+sale+boca+raton&max-results=20

Obviously, these are pretty simple examples and just scratch the surface, but the point is that producing feeds using the Atom standard allows Google to expose their data in a standard, easily parsed format that are simple to consume.

I’ll have something soon on consuming your Google Reader shared items.

More YouTube GData developer docs here.

More Google Base GData developer docs here.

I’m doodling around with a new idea. Since it’s goal is to produce several standardized web feeds (Atom, KML, HTML) of a data set over the web, I’ll be using Ruby. Since it makes sense for this to be a REST web service, I’ll also be using Rails. Mike asked about Rails yesterday, and I just read a GREAT introduction by the Softies on Rails guys called “REST 101“. It’s split into five parts (start reading from the bottom), with the first being a pretty non-technical overview of HTML, HTTP, REST and understanding their differences, and the last being technical code samples to show why Rails is a very clean way to pull this off. It’s very well written and I encourage even non-technical people to read at least the first section. Others can read until their eyes glaze over.

BTW - these guys put on a two day “Essential Rails” seminar in Chicago which I attended this past January. I see another is coming up Sept 21-22. Highly recommended.

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