Lonely Lion

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.

Google jumped into the crowdening [sic] arena of ways-to-make-your-web-app-work-offline with Google Gears. I’m pretty excited about the whole concept. Just last night, me and Mrs. McAvoy were heard to exclaim, “I really like Google Docs, I wish it worked offline.”

Clearly, the Google bugging of my home has finally paid off for the Googineers. Glad the McAvoy’s could help you out guys. Good luck with your Gears.

I want to start messing with this offline stuff. Lots of fun ideas come to mind.

Edited to add: O’Reilly Radar explains the whole thing a lot better than me. We live in the future folks. This is really neat stuff.

Edited (again) to add: Holy cow! Dojo offline is now built on top of Gears! This is the greatest!

At work, I’ve been working with Mochikit. I don’t have a huge javascript background, mostly just fidgeting with other people’s work, so this has been pretty fun. All the toying around with javascript led me to OSX Widgets and Google desktop (widgets? whatever…I can’t keep all these names for little javascript toys straight, you know what I’m talking about…), and found the OSX “Dashcode” application for building widgets.

It’s realllllly slick. So slick, that it almost makes writing a widget not-fun. Ho-hum. Regardless, I’m definitely thinking more about fun things I can do with javascript and JSON than I have in the past. I know I’m (consistently) six months behind the curve, but that’s fine by me. Let those other suckers cut the path. The guy towards the back of the wagon train typically doesn’t blunder over a cliff, right?

Again, I’m way behind the curve here, so forgive me if you already know this, but Firebug rocks.

I had heard of it in the context of debugging Ajax applications, since I don’t do much Ajax, I never looked into Firebug other than installing it when I had some free time. I’m fiddling around with some heavy-ish javascript now, and Firebug has been a huge help. It’s also great for inspecting HTML (it chops up your page into a nice tree structure that you can fold up), CSS, network calls, headers, cookies set…just about everything you could want for inspecting exactly what a page is doing. It’s a great tool. If you haven’t already, install it. Even if you just sit on it for a while, it’s worth the time it takes to install.