One of the key concerns for any fledgling start-up is overload. Too many users trying to get at your data is one thing, but dealing with the onslaught of notifications and data pings from connecting services can be quite another.
A new start-up called Gnip is trying to solve this problem by acting as the middleman. Got a service like Twitter that's getting attacked in a thousand different directions by services trying to get at that data? Sending any new bits of information to Gnip will keep that attack coming on their end instead of yours, which will hopefully keep your service running a lot smoother, no matter how many folks are using it. ReadWriteWeb is calling it a "Grand Central Station for the social Web."
In a perfect world, services that used this system could open up their APIs a little to encompass more activity, leading to faster third-party tools that take advantage of that data. Users would also be getting faster notifications and conceivably less downtime due to overload.
Sounds great for everyone, right?
Unfortunately, all of this will not be available from the get-go. Gnip is starting out by offering a notification service only, with polling, transformation, and identification coming later. Notifications are one of the main overloaders though, especially for services like Twitter that have had to throttle the amount of times any external service can ping it for data. There are also concerns about what happens if everyone starts relying on Gnip to pipe data to third-party tools, and the tool goes down--leading to something similar to when Amazon's S3 has had blips, taking out entire businesses for hours at a time.
Gnip was founded by Eric Marcoullier, one of the co-founders of the now Yahoo-owned MyBlogLog.
Gnip bridges the data divide by offloading all the pings off your servers and onto theirs.
(Credit: Gnip)Microsoft thinks it can win the hearts and minds of future developers by giving them free development tools today. This would be a noble gesture but for one, tiny little fact:
There are 150,000+ free and open-source software projects on Sourceforge (and another 80,000+ on Google Code). The day of placating developers with tools is over. Open source has raised the stakes dramatically. Forever.
Bill Gates, forever stuck in the past, declares:
... Read moreMicrosoft's Live Labs, a standalone product research group, released on Wednesday Volta (download it from CNET Download.com), a development tool designed to make it easier to partition an application's component pieces across a network.
The problem that Microsoft researchers are trying to address is the difficulty of deciding which part of the application runs under which tier--either the client or server.
Typically, developers need to write code to handle the communication between those tiers. And they need to decide during development on how to best architect their applications for optimal performance.
With Volta, developers can make "irreversible decisions as late as possible," said Alex Daley, group product manager for Microsoft Live Labs.
The software, which is an add-in to Visual Studio 2008, lets developers write client-side code and then assign with annotations which code runs where, he explained.
Volta is written using Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL) which means that people familiar with Visual Studio languages, including Visual Basic and C#, can work with it. It also is integrated with tools in Visual Studio, including the debugger, and can make applications for Internet Explorer or Firefox.
Volta hasn't been integrated into Microsoft product plans yet, but it stands to have a major impact on how they design tools, Daley said.
"This kind of idea--where we can share a single code base across client server and manage the complexity of communicating between them--is pretty new and has big implications on how we build tools," he said.
Intel on Tuesday is scheduled to release the source code to a development tool for writing applications to run on multicore chips.
The company released Threading Building Blocks last August, a C++ template designed to simplify the job of writing applications that take advantage of processors with multiple cores, or processing units.
During the last year, Intel found that customers and potential customers wanted greater platform support and assurances that the toolset would be around for a long time, said James Reinders, the director of Intel's software development products.
To address these concerns, Intel has decided to release the tool under the General Public License version 2 with runtime exception. With the runtime exception, commercial software can choose to embed it in their own closed-source products, Reinders said.
Intel will continue to sell support for Threading Building Blocks for $299 a year.
Software vendors and chip manufacturers have for the last few years urged programmers to retool their applications for dual or multicore chips, which are becoming commonplace. But for the most part, there are a few applications that take full advantage of dual-core chips on desktop PCs, for example.
"There is definitely a lot of untapped potential staring us in the face," said Reinders. But "you can't really expect a lot of programmers to do something about parallelism if it is an extreme distraction from their job."
Threading Building Blocks works with Windows, Mac OS X, and popular Linux distributions on x86 chips. Alpha versions of the tool on Solaris 10, FreeBSD and MacOS on G5 chips are also available.
- prev
- 1
- next
