Turbogears Glossom finally live

We started to collaborate with the Glossom project more than an year ago, the first version was a Ruby on Rails prototype and has served well thousand of users for about an year. When the Glossom team decided to rewrite the software to move from a prototype to a more complete software we studied which frameworks were available and finally decided for Turbogears2.

Turbogears is a quite complete and really flexible framework, we used it since version 1.0 for about 3 years and the more we used it the more we loved it. It might have its problems but differently from other solutions when the framework has a limit it is really easy to bypass the framework and implement your own solution without any hack and with a clean way. Turbogears developers really focused on letting your tune each component in any way, and even totally replace it with something else if you don’t like it.

After six months of development the application has finally gone live and is now serving ~10000 registered users with its servers based on an apache load balancer, mod_wsgi turbogears application servers and mysql database servers.

So welcome to Glossom and thank you to Turbogears team for all the help!

We also have to say thank you to FFmpeg for now converting our videos and FlyPDF for generating our PDFs! 😀 (you can download FlyPDF from sourceforge if you want to give it a try)

Successor to cloud computing, aka tweelter new architecture

When you have to perform a real big amount of operations you have two options

  • Increase your computational power (like using a cloud solution or scale on more servers)
  • Move your computations to the most available cloud platform of the world: your users
To improve tweelter performances and avoid overloading twitter API we are studying a new computational architecture for tweelter which can return results to the user faster and give less overhead to our servers.
The key to achieve the result is to move most of the search overhead to the computers of the other users currently viewing tweelter, like SETI@home does, by using tweelter you would speed up other users searches and also your own searches.