khi’s life with an ech

I decided to change the roadmap of the grinderl project.

It first application was to be a tiny load-test framework (at least a testing framework as I’m not sure it is efficient enough to create heavy load on a well design server). And I still have to finish the part of creating useful statistics from all the results.

But now I think that I could implement a better node management API, and then grinderl can become one way to call code on remote host (not exactly as RPC since command are asynchronous and supervised by remote host). One application could be to install an external application on all remote host, or manage deployment like does capistrano (but with the full Erlang environment available!).

So the new (of course, it’s the first!) roadmap:

• Stabilize the current version:
  • move test to become command
  • better handling of results sent by remote hosts
• Develop concurrently the remote node API and a UI:
  • API to manage remote hosts
    • use slave module
    • have a look at this how-to
    • can we install a minimal Erlang node on a remote machine through ssh … using CEAN or erlware maybe?
  • UI: network tools seems to require a network-able UI (probably using yaws) to be able to:
    • see/manage nodes/hosts
    • send command to all/any hosts, monitor results (looks like each command will need a specialize UI)

Conclusion:

• Sad note: nothing new in grinderl (this project don’t seems to appeal my creativity)
• Good note: simple project to learn Erlang distributed programming

• Softskills blog post on Thinking Parallel : I try my best to be open-minded … but I would have never read this book before to read this post: I just don’t like the title “How to win friends & influence people”. But after the blog post, I realized it’s a nice book I can read to learn about “how to behave as a good developer in a good team”. Why am I so not understanding and stopped at the title!? stupid me!
• Tags efficienty at Amazon vs. LibraryThing : before to read this article, I almost forgot that users of a system don’t care to give input to this system! We, as users, only have one objective to target, and system should be transparent. UX Design rules.
• Regular expression can be simple and fast :What!? This time I almost forgot that from all the good software applications around the world, there is probably very few which come from a long scientific study of the subject, with design comparisons and efficiency implementation tests! Most of them come from an idea, quickly throw one day as a piece of code, and evolving as the project mature. I should never forget again: enough is enough! (still, regular expressions with automata is a basic of computer science: don’t forget the basics!)