Akka gRPC with Let’s Encrypt
The Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF) has recommendations about encrypting the web; there is no reason to be running servers over unencrypted HTTP any long...
Posts by Year
2022
TradeAudit Mobile App Infrastructure
The release of the TradeAudit mobile app is almost here. It is currently in MVP stage, but its infrastructure is a pretty typical cloud based deployment. Th...
Lit Custom Components for SVG generation
SVG markup is very similar to HTML, and the Lit Web Components library can be used to not only generate HTML custom components, but also manipulate SVG in a ...
HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) Domains on Github Pages
Github Pages is free hosting for static content webpages, and a cost effective way to publish micro-sites for all of your projects. Can it handle custom dom...
JVM versus Python for AWS Lambda Functions
The suitability of programming languages across different domains is a contested topic. AWS Lambda Functions are a serverless solution that can be used for ...
Scala 3 and AWS Lambda Functions
AWS Lambda offer the ability to run code functions without a server. Basically standalone functions that receive JSON as a parameter and have up to 15 minute...
Downloading from Github Packages using HTTP and Maven
Github Packages is a Maven compatible respository and is accessible independent of Github. This article expands on alternative access to these files, such as...
Scala (SBT) Publishing to Github Packages
Github Packages is a natural extension of a CI/CD pipeline created in Github Action. It currently offers repositories for Java (Maven), .Net (NuGet), Ruby (G...
Emoji Progress Bar for SaaS Integrations
The command line progress bar was the first step towards graphical UI. It was an exciting addition to a numerical percent ticking away as a running task too...
Is Javascript Replacing HTML?
Over time there has been an ebb and flow to the ratio of Javascript:HTML used in websites. What motivates the change, and where is this ratio ultimately head...
2014
Reactive Front-End with Web Components
The Reactive Manifesto puts together the ideal architecture for today’s system infrastructure, designed to cope with the ever increasing need for performan...
DOM Manipulation using Web Components
HTML elements are free to change the style, size, and placement of their children, and even their order. A lot of advanced use cases define rendering based...
ThreadLocal Variables and Scala Futures
Thread-Local storage (TLS) allows static variables to be attached to the currently executing thread. The most common use of TLS is to pass global context t...
Advanced Uses of Polymer Templates
Most sortable HTML table generators (such as AngularJS’s ng-grid) allow cells to be customized and formatted according to templates, however all templates ...
Sortable Table with Polymer Web Components
As businesses now rely more heavily on web applications to perform daily operations, a user friendly datatable/spreadsheet is indispensable to all web deve...
Polymer Data-Binding Filters
One useful feature of modern Javascript libraries is 2-way data-binding. All interactive websites perform this functionality one way or another, but only a...
Maintainable Web Development without Javascript
In the years 2002-2003, Internet Explorer captured 95% of world-wide browser market share. It was unfathomable to many that over the next 10 years IE would d...
Web Components
At the heart of a web page, there are UI elements and these elements interact: with the user, each other, and the server. Although HTML5 expanded the origi...
2013
Real-time Data Mining with Spark
There are 2 new principles at the vanguard of today’s technology: Reactive UX. As the world’s population spends an increasing portion of their lives elect...
Finagle ServerSet Clusters using Zookeeper
The key to high availability is redundancy; it follows that if uptime matters, Finagle needs to be deployed to multiple servers. This article walks through...
Separation of Concerns with Finagle
The Separation of Concerns (SoC) pattern is one of those software architectural choices that everyone is helpful. It increases clarity, shortens the amount o...
Transitioning C# to Scala Using Thrift
A 30 minute presentation I made on Sept 19th in a Scala-Toronto Meetup. The slides introduce Apache Thrift and the additional features offered by the Twitter...
Finagled Client and Multiplexed C# Thrift Server Bug
This is an obscure issue, with an easy workaround, but no obvious solution.
Binary Semaphore Filter
Long running queries are very taxing on a database. But caching idempotent queries may not always be a suitable solution. What happens if queries run for N-s...
Tracking Clients with Finagle
In a Service Oriented Architecture, a service may be used by many different clients – each with with different usage patterns and performance profiles. Behin...
Thrift Client Side Caching to Speed Up Unit Tests
One of the largest headaches associated with network system architecture is abstracting away the network. External resources are always slower and more disjo...
Reusing Finagle Server Filters on the Client
When using Thrift, Finagle Filters on the client inherit from SimpleFilter[ThriftClientRequest, Array[Byte]], while on the server they must inherit from Simp...
Finagle Query Cache with Guava
For many data services, any easy way to reduce database load is to cache calls to semi-static data (ie: append-only, or refreshed only on a set schedule), an...
Developer Friendly Thrift Request Logging
In a system of async service calls, sometimes the most indispensible debugging tool is knowing what and when network traffic is occurring. Unfortunately for ...
Ostrich. Not just for stats, also for documentation.
Ostrich is a stats collector and reporter created by Twitter, and it is a welcome addition to any Finagle (Apache Thrift) implementation. At its core it use...
Multiplexed Services in Finagle
Apache Thrift is a pretty good RPC library. Methods compose a service, and the service is hosted on a raw TCP port. Even a large implementation with a hundr...