Interesting Tech Developments

A couple of really interesting releases took place this week. You've probably read about them already, but here they are: 1. Amazon SimpleDB http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=342335011 Some quick overview details here: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/12/amazon_launches.html Here's what Dave Weiner has to say about it: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2007/12/15/amazonRemovesTheDatabaseSc.html Key point, the wall is gone, replaced with a ramp. If you coded your database in Amazon to begin with you will never see the wall. As you need more capacity you have to do nothing, other than pay your bill. ... The design of Amazon's database is remarkably like the internal data structures of modern programming languages. Very much like a hash or a dictionary (what Perl and Python call these structures) ... In this way it's like XML. I imagine all languages have had to accommodate this feature of XML, so they should all map pretty well on Amazon's structure 2. Google Charts http://code.google.com/apis/chart/ Pretty simple on-the-fly .png chart creation, just construct the data for the chart in an HTTP GET. A sample call looks like: http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=s:Uf9a&chs=250x100&chl=REBOL|Python|Perl|Ruby IIRC, the ceiling on chart requests is 50,000 per day. Ed

Hi Ed, Amazon is cranking out the services fast and furiously. I'm not so sure about the Google chart API though. I understand the desire/need for brevity, but who wants to read and write stuff like this? chf=c,lg,45,ffffff,0,76A4FB,0.75|bg,s,EFEFEF Thanks for the links. -- Gregg

Gregg Irwin napsal(a):

> Hi Ed, > > Amazon is cranking out the services fast and furiously. I'm not so > sure about the Google chart API though. I understand the desire/need > for brevity, but who wants to read and write stuff like this? >

Ahem, <cough> dialect! </cough> Sounds like a lovely candidate for a REBOL dialect tutorial, no? Or perhaps a /View tutorial, which illustrates a tiny client-side app for creating and saving out png files. On Dec 16, 2007 11:40 AM, Gregg Irwin <gregg-pointillistic.com> wrote:

Exactly Petr, you beat me to it. On Dec 16, 2007 12:05 PM, Petr Krenzelok wrote:

Hi Guys, PK> our best friend "dialect" maybe? :-) Of course that was the first thing that crossed my mind too. My comment was aimed more at them, and why didn't they design something friendlier to begin with. -- Gregg

Seems pretty simple to me-- it's very quick to get basic charts out of the API very quickly. Is there a friendlier alternative out there? :^) On Dec 16, 2007 1:28 PM, Gregg Irwin wrote:

Hi Ed, EOC> Seems pretty simple to me-- it's very quick to get basic charts EOC> out of the API very quickly. EOC> Is there a friendlier alternative out there? :^) What I'm trying to say is that this is fairly human-hostile: cht=p3&chd=s:Uf9a&chs=250x100&chl=REBOL|Python|Perl|Ruby Even compared to very minor changes, like this: type=pie3D&data=simple:Uf9a&size=250x100&label=REBOL|Python|Perl|Ruby It's a charting API, so the "ch" part is redundant, no? Then, to keep things short, you only have one letter left to determine what facet you're referring to. At least they got the size format right though. :) I'm not going to fault them too much though. It's a cool service, and points out that there is a lot of value in the basic elements (compared to, say, a multi-megabyte, multi-thousand-dollar add-on package for VS.NET). -- Gregg

It's evolution and early days yet. On Dec 17, 2007 9:51 AM, Gregg Irwin <gregg-pointillistic.com> wrote:

> Hi Ed, > EOC> Seems pretty simple to me-- it's very quick to get basic charts > To unsubscribe from the list, just send an email to > lists at rebol.com with unsubscribe as the subject.

The thing is it has to be a GET. About the only thing it could be that might make it easier would be to have the type parameter be part of the path. But other than that I think the ugliness is intrinsic to the form of a querystring. Cheers, Bryan Rasmussen On Dec 16, 2007 10:15 PM, Graham Chiu <compkarori-gmail.com> wrote: