RE: looking for recommendations for web development companies
Good morning! You make an excellent point and do not sound negative to me at all. This is a 100% valid concern that we do need to consider as we develop our web front end. Even though our product is only used in vehicles (cars, trucks, ships, etc), the discussion is still important on principle. While it is true that the executive group and marketing are one driving force of making the site modern and flashy, there is a real element of making the user interface more intuitive and logical. We are introducing a large number of new, moderately complex, user functions with this release. We are trying to keep the user on one central page and have them use controls that are evocative of something that all drivers are very familiar with: a car dashboard. There are a few other factors that went into the decision making process that I won't go into to spare everyone additional boredom but this is not really just a case of Hey! Make this flashy! We are building smaller interface and lower bandwidth requirements into the model to support a mobile front end as well. Those requirements also could well support a screen reader friendly interface. Thank you very much for your insight. You have certainly given me some things to think about. Have a great day! Ed Date: Fri, 15 Oct 2010 00:37:32 -0700 From: st...@holmesgrown.com To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us Subject: Re: looking for recommendations for web development companies I appreciate your interest in looking to the community for ideas for development support. However I am concerned about what you are seeking in your web design goals. I as a blind person, take particular exception to things like heavy animation and eye candy! Frankly, eye candy most often flies in the face of accessibility; that is, the more eye candy, the more flash and the more animation someone throws at a website the far less easy it is for a blind person to even navigate around on such a site. Sory if I come off negative here but I think there should be a lot more to a good website than just artistic beauty or cuteness. In fact, I'm personally studying web development on my own time since my recent lay-off but it is all being done on a LAMP type setup - Linux Apache, MySQL (actually postgresql in my case) and php so I can eventually become marketable with these newer more modern skills. --- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
RE: looking for recommendations for web development companies
The original impetus for this effort was two fold. 1. updated user experience since we are rolling out a much more capable site to replace a very simple one. 2. shifting our design methodology to MVC (Model-View-Controller) our programmers have all of the back end coding under control and we were just looking for someone to literally just build the front end in whatever tools and code that worked best. We wanted to avoid flash and that left us with HTML5, AJAX, JSON, javascript and everything you mentioned. When I think of non-proprietary development, I think of PLUG. I have met a number of very capable people here and wanted to meet my goals and support the local community at the same time. In all candor, we have gotten a good number of proposals for this work and when I compare the companies that were sent to me by the executive and marketing groups of my company against the companies/contractors that I contacted through my efforts here, the local community stacks up very well indeed. This group is full of very skilled professionals and I enjoyed talking with all of them. Ed Date: Fri, 15 Oct 2010 09:55:34 -0600 Subject: Re: RE: looking for recommendations for web development companies From: kfri...@gmail.com To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us I started following this thread late, but it sounds as if you are looking for a flex+rails type of setup. Am I reading that right? Rails is often thought of for ecommerce, and it is excellent in that role. When you step out of that role, role, rails usually falls apart as a desirable solution very quickly. One exception is as middleware for a client server app. The end client could be flex (aka flash), all fancy and user friendly. The interface would establish a connection to a server (secured if needed) and send messages as xml, or even better a json. The Rails server would then act in proxy for the client and obtain the result from your back end app. Rails would then respond back, probably in xml ot json. Rails is very flexible allowing additional functionlity as new controllers are added, or existing controllers are upgraded with new commands. Was that what you were looking for? Kevin Fries --- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
RE: looking for recommendations for web development companies
not at all! this is exactly why I continue to subscribe and read the PLUG list after all these years. I have more of a sysadmin and networking background; coding is definitely outside my professional skill set but I learn a tremendous amount through the list and get exposed constantly to new (to me) things that I can explore on my own. I understand what you are saying and I am indeed going to read up on Flex. I am not a professional programmer but it helps me in my job to have as wide a view as possible of the issues they face and the tools they have available to move the effort forward. Thanks! Ed Date: Fri, 15 Oct 2010 11:18:30 -0600 Subject: Re: RE: looking for recommendations for web development companies From: kfri...@gmail.com To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us Ok, so I wasn't far off at all. Take a look at Rails as a middleware, its often overlooked in this role. Flex is sotra flash on steroids. But if you have an aversion to that, ajax, json, etc can be substituted. What I was suggesting was not to write your app in Ruby, it was to use rails to handle the communications with your end clients. You could even have multiple clients, using different technologies, and even different communication protocols by using Rails as a muddleware. Just trying ti give you ideas to resolve your development design. Kevin Fries --- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
RE: Gangplank
When I am between gigs (consulting, employee, whatever), I sometimes go down there to work on my own stuff and it is exactly like that. You visit, pick a free spot and do whatever. I don't interact all that much because I just crank on my own projects but the space is very cool and comfortable... the vibe is a bunch of technology people doing interesting stuff. Everyone that I have met and spoken with was very nice and welcoming. I even caught a few of the lunch time presentations that were pretty thought provoking. It is shared space with some real companies nestled in there too so it is a real work space. It is worth the visit. Hope that helps! Ed Knapp Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2010 13:08:28 -0700 From: klsmith2...@yahoo.com Subject: Gangplank To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us Lisa mentioned Gangplank in her email, which got me to thinking. I read about Gangplank last year some time. I have wondered about such an environment. I seem to recall it was said to be a free place to work. Bring your laptop and find a place. It was described as a place to connect with other techies. Is this the case? Have any of you spent time there? Any feedback? Keith Smith --- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss --- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
Re: load balanced configuration
One thing struck me here with your description... ³and a change to the DNS and we are off and running² While your DNS records might be changed relatively quickly during an incident, the change Itself can take quite a while to trickle down to the end users/clients out in the cloud. Any client¹s DNS resolution that has not expired in the cache nor manually refreshed will still fail to properly resolve/connect. It doesn¹t usually, but I tell clients to plan for 48 hours Estimated time for the change to completely propagate. I would hate for you to get blindsided with a person hovering over you asking how much longer It is going to take before the site is back up and operational. It is frustrating when you have Fixed the issue [ problem :-) ] but have to just sit and wait for it to complete. There are certainly strategies to mitigate this risk and I do not know if you maintain your Own DNS servers or do you work through a hosting provider/domain registrar. I hope this helps a bit. Ed On 5/19/10 2:07 PM, keith smith klsmith2...@yahoo.com wrote: Currently we have two servers in our main data center. One serves our shopping cart. The other contains quite a bit of content that is data driven (reads). The content site is very active. The orders on the shopping cart are spread apart by one or two minutes during the busiest part of the day. We store a lot of data with each order so most of this is writing. The shopping cart is backed up to the server in the other data center. Supposedly if there is a problem, a few things need to be done to the backup server in preparation to make it live, and a change to the DNS and we are off and running. The problem I am trying to solve is the other server (content site) is not currently backed up automatically. Another layer of this is these are managed servers. We have an excellent relationship with the data center owner and have 24/7 access to him and his staff. He manages all three servers and has always done a good job. I am the one tasked with keeping our sites online 24/7. I was hoping by configuring two servers, each in a different location, that, in the event of one of the data centers being completely severed from the Internet that the other server would automatically, without any human intervention, take over the full load of the other server and those visiting either of our sites would not know there had been an issue. In a nutshell I am trying to create an automated backup that is a automated fail over solution. I appreciate all your feedback! Keith Smith --- On Wed, 5/19/10, Dan Dubovik dand...@gmail.com wrote: From: Dan Dubovik dand...@gmail.com Subject: Re: load balanced configuration To: Main PLUG discussion list plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us Date: Wednesday, May 19, 2010, 1:45 PM The question I have, are you trying to actually load balance things? Or just have a remote location that you can fire up with live data at a moments notice? Basically, are you wanting an active/active configuration, or active/passive? active/active across DC's can get kind of hairy depending on what the network looks like. active/passive won't give you any performance gains, but can simplify the configuration, while providing the HA you seem to be after. As Kaia pointed out, what the traffic looks like (reads vs writes) is a consideration. If it is something that users don't write to, and data doesn't have to be replicated across DCs frequently, this further simplifies things. Ultimately, the configuration will depend on what the application and network looks like currently, and what level of redundancy you want / need. -- Dan. On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 1:40 PM, Matt Iavarone matt.iavar...@gmail.com /mc/compose?to=matt.iavar...@gmail.com wrote: I think the original question was around stateless load balancing, not clustering. Cross DC clustering is a headache, but HA web sites aren't exactly terchnical challenges these days. On May 19, 2010 4:33 PM, Alex Dean a...@crackpot.org /mc/compose?to=a...@crackpot.org wrote: On May 19, 2010, at 2:47 PM, keith smith wrote: Hi Plug, I am considering combining the ... You're entering a world of pain. :) HA is cool, but is no panacea. If you haven't actually experienced downtime due to your server crashing or your datacenter losing connectivity, I recommend thinking long and hard about it. Don't solve a problem you don't have. The downtime created from unneeded failovers will likely exceed the actual/real downtime caused by either a server or datacenter being offline. Managing the cluster itself (as distinct from the services provided by the cluster) needs to be accounted for as an expense/responsibility. I don't want to sound overly pessimistic. I've set up quite a few HA clusters, and actually enjoy it most of the time. But it WILL cause you headaches in the middle of the
Re: load balanced configuration
Similar idea... It sounds like the change in the NIC hardware caused a loss of connectivity because of The Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) information in the local router/switch¹s cache. DNS relates a name record to an IP address and ARP associates the IP address with the Physical hardware address burned in the NIC. The router/switch still had the old address stored because It resolves, caches, and refreshes ARP information just like DNS. A simple ARP flush probably fixed the problem. Your description is correct below... a submitted DNS change through your data centre host Can/will be reflected immediately after they do it for all subsequent DNS resolution requests. All clients/end users that have previously completed a DNS resolution will have bad info cached Until it expires and they resolve the name again. The redundancy and reliability built into the DNS System also introduces a certain amount of latency for changes and updates. Ed On 5/19/10 7:57 PM, keith smith klsmith2...@yahoo.com wrote: This is kind of fizzy to me. I'm glad you brought it up. I did experience this 6 to 9 month ago when the data center chanced the NIC card. I think they had to flush some buffers in their routers so the new MAC address could be found and cached if I recall correctly. We are in a data center and use their DNS. So I'm thinking the request goes to the root server then to the data center's DNS and it tells the client what the IP address is. So if the Data Center's DNS is changed to point to a new IP for our domain then that would be instantaneous or would the client and everyone along the way cache the IP? --- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
Re: load balanced configuration
Absolutely. In practice, this is not that big of an issue but I was more commenting on this As a potential situation. I was serious about having someone standing over the shoulder anxiously Awaiting the service to come back up. That scenario was my first thought and it sucks when it happens and the OP took my response as I had hoped. ³Hmmm, interesting thread, I will ask a few more questions and get a handle on how this will really Go down in the real world.² Thanks for everyone¹s contributions to the thread. Ed On 5/19/10 8:29 PM, Bryan O'Neal bryan.on...@theonealandassociates.com wrote: This is very true - but in practice this is not as common as you think. Our studies using DynDNS showed that Cox, Time Warner, Verizon, Qwest, Yahoo (Via dns change not ISP hosting), and MegaPath did not cache, at least not more then a few min. I was unable to find anyone actually on AOL or EathLink or Comcast to test with. I did have a person on some small ISP like RoadRunner and they did cache. Mind you our studies were not very scientific - call person we know on network have them hit site, change dns, have them hit site again. For some providers we only had one or two people using them. And for all the Yahoo based ISP's we just changed our primary DNS and tested ourselves. But, what we found supported our experience in that it was not a big issue. --- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
