Connorhd » Links

How To Node

Connorhd — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:18:10 +0000

At the risk of being boring, another node related link. A collection of articles written about node (mainly as tutorials) by the node community.

Try Ruby!

Connorhd — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 14:09:18 +0000

A site I came across some time ago, Try Ruby gives you an interactive (AJAX) ruby shell, with a simple tutorial to follow. In my opinion an awesome way to get started with a new language, I find learning is much easier by trying things out.

If you like this then you may also be interested in Try MongoDB (a similar MongoDB tutorial) and also codepad (a pastebin that allows you to execute certain programming languages and view the result).

dafont.com

Connorhd — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:05:43 +0000

Not that interesting, but an awesome site for finding fonts. Currently has over 10,000 free fonts, including the one used for the slogan on this site!

Domainr

Connorhd — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:16:03 +0000

A useful domain name finding tool I came across recently, Domainr lets you search less well known domain name extensions and tries to find the shortest possible domain for any word you enter. Also helpfully shows the availability of the domains it finds.

MongoDB

Connorhd — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 01:57:12 +0000

Another nosql project, mongodb provides more than just key-value pair storage. It is a document orientated database (along the lines of relational databases, but without a fixed structure for tables, or relational queries). That is, you can store objects (documents) that contain any combination of fields and data (data being strings, numbers, arrays or objects themselves), and then perform queries on them.

I have been interested in using mongo as a logging system for Ircster for a while now (it supports large sets of data with full text search and very fast queries), however until recently there was no reasonable driver for node. There are now two drivers available node-mongodb (bindings to the C driver) and node-mongodb-native (a JS implementation of the driver). The native driver especially interests me as I can more easily understand and work with the code.

Redis

Connorhd — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:50:39 +0000

I’ve been aware of a number of so called nosql projects (databases that aren’t relational) for some time and I finally have an opportunity to use one for a good reason.

Redis is an extremely fast key-value pair database (a hash table basically) that also includes fast, atomic set and list operations. I’m planning to use it as part of my group software project at uni, the project requires us to handle large amounts of data with a large number of requests per second, which makes 110,000 writes per second (one of the features of Redis) very appealing.

Node.js

Connorhd — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 02:20:48 +0000

So, the point of this blog is for me to post about things that interest me, this seems like a pretty obvious start.

Node.js is “Evented I/O for V8 javascript” this means you can perform I/O (read files, send across the internet etc) in an extremely efficient way, and write your code in JavaScript (something I find very attractive). I am currently using this for a number of projects including Ircster (more posts on this later).