Disqus - Latest Comments for jducoeur

Re: An Octavo of Stanzas

jducoeur — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:37:50 -0000

I'd agree with the previous posters that "octavo" does sound like it implies a specific number. (It actually *sounds* like it implies 8.) So on that basis I might prefer folio, although I would agree that octavo sounds cooler.

(And I do agree that having a collective noun, while unnecessary, is worth doing just for the fun value.)

Personally, I'd argue for "sonnet". But I'm partial to Elizabethan poetry. (And for those few who actually know the form, I can imagine someone thinking that specifically implies four stanzas...)

Re: Brevity And Programming Languages

jducoeur — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 13:01:53 -0000

Hadn't even occurred to me that one could plug non-Erlang into ejabberd. I'll have to think carefully about that -- even if I decide to use Scala, it's conceivable that ejabberd might be a more natural fit for the Actors-oriented architecture than Openfire. And it's good to know that the DB issues can be disabled easily: I suspect that any DB access I really want is going to be coming out of the app itself.

Thanks much!

Re: Brevity And Programming Languages

jducoeur — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:53:08 -0000

Fair point, although so far I suspect both of those Scala issues are potentially okay so long as it's used properly. More interesting to me is the question of whether Scala's distributed-Actor mechanism is mature enough for prime-time yet, which matters a lot for scaling. I'm still considering the jury out: my biases are strongly towards Scala's multi-paradigm approach (the code is just plain *natural* for me), but it's possible that it hasn't caught up to Erlang enough yet.

On that subject, I was poking around this afternoon on essentially this tradeoff. I suspect I'm going to write my XMPP server as a plugin in either Openfire (in Scala) or ejabberd (in Erlang), and while I was surfing on that topic, I came across an earlier post of yours about some of the drawbacks you'd encountered in ejabberd. IIRC, you said that it was something of a memory hog, and that it needed to do DB hits for every packet sent.

I was wondering if you have any further info or thoughts on that? The latter is a particular concern for me: my app is *entirely* about essentially group chat (possibly implemented using PubSub -- not sure yet), so I'm particularly concerned about DB load when there's a lot of fanout of messages...

Re: Brevity And Programming Languages

jducoeur — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:59:35 -0000

Yeah, that's just the point I was going to make. I like ejabberd in principle (I think it's a very sensible model for XMPP servers), but Erlang makes me nuts. So I'm moving myself into Scala, whose Actor system seems to have most of the benefits of Erlang, but it's a much more complete language...