Lonely Lion

This is tremendously sad news. Pigeon man was a fixture on the corner across the street from Walgreens. From the article:

“Soon as I take a seat, they want to be loved and kissed like a mama’s baby,” Zeman was quoted in the Tribune article. “Like I’m their father, and they’re my child.”

Quite a well thought out rant about why Django, not Pylons. Although I agree with most of his points, I get frustrated with these posts as they end up pulling a lot of nutbags from the nutbag store, who usually act like big nutbags in the comments.

Competition and opinions are good. Comment-baiting perfectly valid projects (just because I like Django’s oomph more than Pylon’s doesn’t mean that Pylons is bad (far from it), it’s just not for me) is a fast track to not-dating-ville.

I’d like to put forward the following bit of Franklin-like common sense wisdom, “no one ever got laid by arguing about web frameworks.” Thanks Adam for putting on paper why a lot of us prefer Django to PylonTurboZopeGears, but screw you dummy blog trolls that really believe there’s some sort of conflict worth taking sides on.

Save your energy for things that matter, like football.

Article in Wired.

Clearly you and I have moved on, but I still occasionally whip you out to write one-off backup scripts, or to munge up a big text file. You and I had a really great time together. You helped me build a career, we had a lot of laughs, and a lot of sigils. Happy 20th Perl.

Amazon is starting a limited beta of an online database they’re calling SimpleDB. It’s functionally very similar to CouchDB, in that it uses REST for queries and inserts, stores data in flat “schema-less” pages, and is generally geared towards web-app-like data. The NYTimes DBSlayer takes a half-fast approach by layering a JSON REST API on top of an existing relational database.

Although these three projects each take a different stab at the same problem, they all agree on one thing, “you should really put DB in your name…somewhere.”

Amazon SimpleDB solves the problem that a lot of EC2 explorers end up running into the minute they want to have persistent data across sessions. Because EC2 is a fresh slate on each reboot, typical databases aren’t really usable, unless you spend an awful lot of time figuring out how to off-load your data to Amazon S3 on a regular basis.

I wish I had some sort of pithy analysis of the recent leanings by web-visionaries away from SQL databases and towards these sort of REST db’s. The timeline in my head goes something like this:

Raw SQL begat ORMs begat full stack web frameworks begat wrapping a REST interface around an ORM begat “hey, let’s have our controllers talk to the REST interface, rather than the ORM” begat “hey, why do we need an ORM, or a traditional database? Let’s just make a REST accessible database!”

I guess that’s relatively pithy.

Really though, I’m not entirely sure what to make of this “trend.” I’ve yet to build even a trivial project using any of the three (Amazon is a closed beta, so I’m not sure if it’ll even be a possibility anytime soon). Maybe it’s time I take a crack at one of them.

In case you haven’t seen it.