Hyperion Reactor The Middle Child of History

Representational State Transfer (REST) was introduced and defined in 2000 by Roy Fielding in his doctoral dissertation. Fielding is one of the principal authors of the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) specification versions 1.0 and 1.1.

Since my current application is just a bunch of REST services, I needed to test these calls before publishing them. Unfortunately there were no good tools I could use to test these calls. I spent some time searching for scripts or apps that can make my life easier till I ran into this jewel somewhere on the web

Drupal tries to cater to 80% of the market by taking most decisions for you. Generally this is a good idea. But if you fall in the remaining 20% then you need to get your hands dirty and start hacking around. Drupal by default stores all sessions in the database. This is a good idea if your site does not get a lot of load. But as your site starts growing, this will soon become a major bottleneck. Storing sessions in memcache works best in such situations. Not only is memcache easy to maintain, install and work with, but also provides in depth stats about itself.

I have been playing a lot with Drupal lately. I must say it does feel weird getting back to PHP after so much Ruby; but it is a refreshing change. One of the the things I noticed is that Drupal 6 adds a LOWER() to the column names when it does a select. Not that this is bad but then it confuses MySQL, and instead of using the "name" index it runs through the entire database. This is not a issue if your site has a few hundred users. But now consider a site that has about 5 million users (which is what I am dealing with)

I just finished hacking up this patch, that prevents it from adding the LOWER() to the column names. This boosted something as simple as the login process from 5 seconds to milliseconds. 5 seconds may not sound a lot to you; but then I use a Dell 1950 as my development box. Not that it is the best box in the world, but it is pretty powerful.

A challenge I faced recently was "scaling up on demand" (without manual intervention). EC2 was the my platform of choice because I could write a small script to manage all my machines. EC2 being Xen based also allowed me to create custom images of my application servers.

1. Hook into the load balancer's health monitor
2. If the load goes over 70% launch a new ec2 instance
3. If the load goes under 50% remove an instance

Example:

With 75,000+ Drupal power websites and an emerging industry supporting over 150 professionals, the open-source Drupal project and community is exploding. At the heart of this community is an incredibly active and productive group of contributors. Creating contributed modules, themes, bug fixes, and core enhancement, these individuals define the course of the Drupal project and the ecosystem of users, tinkerers, and professionals around it.

Drupal is a free software project, that is maintained and developed by a community of users and developers that run into thousands. Drupal aims at being a community based content management system. But users and developers have hacked it to do everything from manage their personal websites to run a corporate website. Drupal makes it easy to publish content for every. The powerful taxonomy system in Drupal helps users organize their data and knowledge with ease.