Abhinav Sharma » Development

Check out Redis

Abhinav — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 08:30:56 +0000

Off late, I’ve been working on a project where we’re using a simple key-value store instead of a relational DBMS like MySQL, and I’ve come to realize that if done properly, a lot of applications don’t require a relational database. Redis, being a simple key-value store is ridiculously quick, so try it out, and avoid MySQL when its not really required.

Redis

Facebook Opens Up Platform: fbOpen

Abhinav — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 10:19:51 +0000

Here it is, many considered it inevitable after OpenSocial, and Facebook have responded by opening up their own platform. Even though the OpenSocial adopters are sticking with Google for now, I think fbOpen will catch on eventually, at least I find it the easiest platform to develop for.

The fb-open-platform.tar.gz archive contains the tools necessary to implement Facebook Open Platform — including the API, FBML (Facebook Markup Language), FBJS (Facebook JavaScript), and FQL (Facebook Query Language) — in your own environment. It also contains libfbml-1.2.0.tar.gz, which contains the essential libraries for parsing and rendering FBML.

Download fbOpen

Facebook Application Development: 10 Things to Know

Abhinav — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 12:04:13 +0000

This comes from padrenel’s blog. It discusses important things to know while getting started with Facebook application development. Must read in my opinion, helped me immensely. It discusses:

PHP4 vs. PHP5
Session Keys
Updating Profiles with fb:ref
Debugging tools
Support and Documentation

Complete article here.

Getting beaten at my own game!

Abhinav — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 18:51:52 +0000

Trust me, it doesn’t feel good, but it proves a point, I made a fair game! Yes, the Indian Premier League has begun and so has my application for Facebook. Here’s how I’m doing in the fantasy game:

Not looking too good, I’m afraid!

Periodically back up MySQL with a Shell Script

Abhinav — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 05:12:26 +0000

There are many advantages to using the shell, one is making backups. With the following code and a cron job, periodically backing up MySQL databases is a breeze.

#!/bin/sh
mkdir `date +%m-%d-%y-%Hx%M`
cd `date +%m-%d-%y-%Hx%M`
mysqldump -h localhost  -u user -ppassword dbname > file.sql

Why isn’t the internet hosted in Korea/Japan?

Abhinav — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 04:37:18 +0000

South Korea and Japan are world leaders in terms of broadband penetration, costs and bandwidth. What surprises me is why most of the world’s hosts are based out of the United States.

Now, the cost of an internet connection is not just bandwidth costs, it includes hardware, technical expertise, etc. but even considering that, it might still be worth it to invest in Korea/Japan.

I understand costs for consumers and corporations will be different, but country-to-country, they run parallel.

United States, 67.23% (52,277,677)
Germany, 5.71% (4,442,041)
Canada, 3.60% (2,802,411)
United Kingdom, 3.37% (2,617,679)
China, 3.22% (2,503,430)
The rest combined, 16.86% (13,111,810)

This is virtually a U.S. monopoly. Compare this with the following chart showing average download speeds across the world.

Seems to me like one part of the internet is still stuck in the non-global 1990s. Look out for fireworks in this industry if some people are willing to make bold investments.

OpenSocial Video Tutorials

Abhinav — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:29:35 +0000

After researching the possibilities of porting my Indian Premier League application from Facebook to Orkut, I have begun aquatinting myself with the basics of the OpenSocial platform which Orkut uses, and these video tutorials provided by Google are an excellent tool.

Social Apps – Usage Discipline?

Abhinav — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:14:44 +0000

We developers love it when people use our applications on social networks, but sometimes it can go a little too far, one of my friend’s profile looks something like this:

PlotKit and Flotr – JavaScript Graphing Solutions

Abhinav — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:54:05 +0000

I’m pretty happy with the Google Charts API but in case you’re looking for even more graphing solutions for your website, there are two that are more advanced:

PlotKit

PlotKit is a Chart and Graph Plotting Library for Javascript. It has support for HTML Canvas and also SVG via Adobe SVG Viewer and native browser support.

Flotr

Flotr comes from Plotr, which itself was derived from Plotkit, here’s the official description:

Flotr is a javascript plotting library based on the Prototype Javascript Framework (version 1.6.0.2 at the moment) and inspired by Flot (written by Ole Laursen).

Flotr enables you to draw appealing graphs in most modern browsers with an easy to learn syntax. It comes with great features like legend support, negative value support, mouse tracking, selection support, zoom support, event hooks, CSS styling support and much more.

Both are nice solutions, PlotKit itself derived from an older library called CanvasGraph. If you know others, do mention them in the comments.

Why are there so few India-centric web applications?

Abhinav — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 10:55:26 +0000

Here’s your answer! Internet penetration in India is just plain lousy, so where’s the incentive for us developers?