Integrating with social sites, such as twitter, seems to be so easy, and it actually can be, once you get the configuration set up correctly. Last day however, I spend most of my time trying to hunt down a 406 error code when trying to login using a twitter account. According to the twitter site I have to :
- Think of a name for my application, well that was not too hard
- Enter a description
- Tell on which domain your twitter application will be hosted, but you can enter a placeholder for this if you don’t know that yet, or want to test
And then you should be set and ready to go. Read more…
During the 10th Devoxx at Antwerp a presentation was given about MongoDB by Brendan McAdams from 10Gen.
This was one of the presentations during this event which I attended. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the ease of use and the features of this product. MongoDB is a NoSQL (non-relational, next-generation operational datastore and databases) database which is a schema-less database having huge advantages over most current existing RDBM databases.
The main pros of MongoDB can be divided in the following three:
- Flexibility
- Performance
- Scalability
The aim of this article is to give an idea of this product, by giving an overview of advantages and disadvantages. Next, I will give some pointers to take into consideration in order to determine if this type of database is suitable for a specific situation or not. At the end of this article I will provide the link to the presentation that was given, providing more details (like example models & queries). Read more…
Google Maps API Web Services
Various websites use Google Maps to indicate a location on a map. In a simple way one can construct a link towards Google Maps via which a location is displayed. For instance, the following image provides an example.
Read more…
The Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) of Amazon offers flexible scaling for your services. It provides you with a ‘self-owned’ host in the cloud over which you can have full-control by selecting the operating system and ability to configure its applications/services.
The hostname of those hosts are not logically providing its functions. All the hostnames in the EC2 cloud become of the format ec2-AA-BB-CC-DD.compute-1.amazonaws.com where a more human friendly name for its purpose may be better. Just like an IP address alone no ones really links that name to the purpose of some system, but when a database server would called db.amazonaws.com it makes the purpose of the easier to get. This would neither be possible as names in the same domain must be unique. Dynamic DNS could assist you here if you can insert the EC2 instances in your own domain name, for instance, db.mydomain.example.
In order to provide your hosts in the cloud with logical names, all you must have is a Dynamic-DNS enabled domain name and you need to setup and configure a Dynamic DNS client.
Step 1: Enable your domain name service with Dynamic DNS. For instance, you can register an account in a public service (DynDNS) that enables Dynamic DNS under their name service.
Step 2: Setup a hostname within the Dynamic DNS system. For instance, you can register a dynamically named host the domain of the public service of DynDNS.
Step 3: Install a Dynamic DNS client that connects to the name service. For instance, you can install ddclient at your host.
Step 4: Configure the Dynamic DNS client. For instance, DynDNS has even very nice option to generate the configuration of ddclient for you.
Step 5: Start the Dynamic DNS client that connects to the name service.
Now you reach your host with the assigned name.
Recently Amazon has launch their Elastic Beanstalk as part of there Cloud service offering. The Elastic Beanstalk functions as an infinite scalable application server while taking away a lot of system administration work. A closer look reveals that it is the combined functionality of the the Elastic Load Balancer and the Elastic Compute Cloud. As a result one does not need to setup any system with an OS, additional applications and neither does one have to consider system security. Therefore, only knowledge of building, uploading and deploying a war file is needed. These typical development tasks enable a developer to run and maintain a web application without the help of a system administrator.
The first step to use the Elastic Beanstalk service is setting up an amazon account if you have not done so already, because you might have bought something there, followed by the sign up for the service.
The second step is log-in to the Amazon Webservices Console and start registering your application. In the AWS console this is referred to as Environment and via ‘Create Environment’ you can setup, upload and deploy your first application. In the AWS console you can also maintain the application via ‘actions’ in the environment associated with the application. The most important part of this process is choosing the name of the application by which it becomes publicly available. The naming convention is <application>.elasticbeanstalk.com, for instance, the application myApplication would be accessed over the Internet as myapplication.elasticbeanstalk.com. You can actually choose any name you like as long as it is unique in the domain elasticbeanstalk.com. Of course, this limits the choice of the application name, but ideally you would run the service in your own DNS domain.
The last but third step which is hardly describe anywhere is to make your application available under your own fully qualified domain name, for instance, www.myapplication.com (assuming you own the domain myapplication.com). In that case a simple CNAME record in DNS where www.myapplication.com refers to myapplication.beanstalk.com. would suffice.
To summarize application setup in the Elastic Beanstalk:
- Create/Setup the account for the AWS console and sign up for the Elastic Beanstalk product.
- Setup your Elastic beanstalk application in the AWS console and upload/deploy the war file that is your website.
- Create a CNAME record in your DNS name referring to the beanstalk application.
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