Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Tuesday, 27th January 2009

Switching from scripting languages to Objective C and iPhone: useful libraries. Matt Biddulph collects together some very useful libraries for developers just getting started with Objective-C (though I’m not too keen on the title).

# 5:50 pm / iphone, matt-biddulph, objectivec, programming

A Year Later, AOL Is Contemplating A Bebo Sale. Ignore the headline and read the actual article—Mike Butcher’s description of how Bebo targeted old fashioned TV advertising agencies while other social networks ignored them completely is riveting.

# 6:13 pm / advertising, agencies, aol, bebo, mike-butcher

Sharding Counters on Google App Engine. “While the datastore for App Engine scales to support a huge number of entities it is important to note that you can only expect to update any single entity, or entity-group, about five times a second”. This article explains a technique for sharding writes across multiple counters in detail, including a way to keep a memcache counter updated at the same time for faster reads.

# 8:27 pm / appengine, caching, google, googleappengine, memcache, python, scaling, sharding