Simon Willison’s Weblog

What You Need To Know About Amazon SimpleDB. Amazon have finally launched the database component of their web service suite. It fits a bunch of current trends: key/value pairs, schemaless, built on top of Erlang. “Eventual consistency” is an interesting characteristic.

# 11:21 am / amazon, simpledb, web-services, schemaless, erlang, hashtables, scaling, databases, charles-ying

Amazon SimpleDB overview. Attribute values are limited to 1,024 bytes; Amazon suggest that you store larger fields in S3 and use SimpleDB to query metadata about those objects.

# 11:39 am / amazon, metadata, s3, simpledb, web-services

BBC iPlayer now supports streaming Flash for Mac and Linux. Absolutely fantastic—it Just Works, you hit the homepage and you can be watching video in seconds. No need to even sign up for an account. I imagine IP ranges are used to block access from outside the UK.

# 12:36 pm / bbc, flash, iplayer, linux, mac, osx

Two-Faced Django. Excellent Django tutorial by Will Larson that shows how to build a polling application with an interface both on the Web and in Facebook. Also touches on unit testing and Ajax using jQuery.

# 2:44 pm / ajax, django, facebook, javascript, jquery, pyfacebook, python, tutorial

stompserver. I think this is the lightweight message queue I’ve been looking for: written in Ruby and EventMachine, easy to set up (thanks to gems), interoperates perfectly with stomp.py.

# 4:40 pm / eventmachine, gems, lightweight, message-queues, messaging, python, ruby, stomp