I had the luck (and I say this considering the number of talented engineers within Shine) of attending AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas recently. For those who don't know, re:Invent is an annual conference held by AWS. It's a chance for customers, vendors and AWS staff...
With the current move to cloud computing, the need to scale applications presents itself as a challenge for storing data. If you are using a traditional relational database you may find yourself working on a complex policy for distributing your database load across multiple database instances. This solution will often present a lot of problems and probably won’t be great at elastically scaling.
As an alternative you could consider a cloud-based NoSQL database. Over the past few weeks I have been analysing a few such offerings, each of which promises to scale as your application grows, without requiring you to think about how you might distribute the data and load.
Node.js has impressed me several times with high performance right out of the box. In my last Node.js project it was the same: we beat the given performance targets without having to tweak the application at all. I never really experienced this in Java EE projects. Granted the project was perfectly suited for Node.js: a small project centered around fetching JSON documents from CouchDB. Still I wanted to know: how would Java EE compare to Node.js in this particular case?
“In our (admittedly limited) experience, Redis is so fast that the slowest part of a cache lookup is the time spent reading and writing bytes to the network” - stackoverflow.com
It’s very rare that a project can cause an engineer to get excited about the prospect of working with a database they've never worked with previously, especially when it’s a relational one. That mainly boils down to the fact that the majority of them are clunky monstrosities that are painfully slow and cause us to grimace at the thought of having to integrate them into our applications, not to mention having to piece together gnarly and over engineered SQL statements.
Cliffano Subagio from Shine Technologies presented together with Carl Husselbee from Sensis "JavaScript from Nose to Tail" at the August MelbJS Meetup. The slides and the video of the presentation are now online....