ThinkingNectar

I was at Yahoo! SIngapore office to attend the Singapore Flex User Group (FUG) meetup for the month of September 2008. Honestly I was there only for one item in the agenda, which is the last item of the night covering EC2 and other web services by Amazon.

But of course I am open to other technologies and was rather interested to see what Flex have to offer. THe opening of the session was done by Hu Shunjie, the guy running the show. As usual, the background of FUG, and the call for volunteers and a plug for the coming 2CS4th of September event. He is really a likable guy very much like Micheal of the SIngapore PHP User Group.

The show first started with Alex with a introduction to Flex. Which is a framework to create rich internet application. Based on Actionscript 3. Showing what can be found on flex.org/showcase, the audience can better understand what are rich internet application.

I am especially impressed by how far can you go demo by Air New Zealand and Alex also shows buzzword, and in his words:

The first real web-based word processor with version control.

And next was he showed Photoshop express, well, by Adobe. An online live editing service to edit your images. Pretty nice.

Going into the technical part, a Flex application + actionscript + MXML gives the swf needed to produce the rich internet application. And a live demo was done to create a simple ebook catalogue. The presentation was done in drag and drop with many standard objects readily to be used. The logic flow is highly event based and most developers who are comfortable with AJAX should feel comfortable following the example.

I was impressed with the feature to reduce the actual size of the final SWF by having the end product using a runtime share library for the first round of optimisation and to remove debugging information to reduce the file size even more.

I do enjoy the simple presentation and it seems rather easy to pick up. Less the expensive looking IDE by Adobe.

Next in line is Vishnu talking about cold fusion. CF is a key part of Macromedia (which had been bought over by Adobe) MX product. It is server side component in Macromedia MX having ajax integration, is platform independent and plays well with most databases.

Vishnu covers CFML, which is the markup language used by ColdFusion and its open source counter part, highlighting Railo and Bluedragon. As like any server side scripting language, CFML can run off Apache.

CF syntax seems to requires a fair bit of formatting, a lot of tags from what I can see. And according to Vishnu, CF is widely employed in the Stats in the public sector.

Some advantage of using CF is that it integrates easily with Java application and is in short a wrapper for Java. The extension for ColdFusion files is .cfm. And like other scripting languages, CF have it own share of framework which firstly, give it some OO capabilities and then some RAD features.

And notably the famous example of CFM deployment is MySpace.

Finally it is Alvin Zhang who will be talking about ec2 which is the reason why i am here in the first place. He is a regular speaker at FUG. He will talk about cloud computing in general using S3 and EC2 as examples.

He talked about Amazon web services which have Elastic Cloud Computing (ec2), S3, EBS and AMI (Amazon Machine Image). And to add in. Amazon Mechanical Turks and SimpleDb.

He started with basic hosting concerns which are as follows:

• speed
• performance
• resilience to failures
• securty
• scalability
• cost
• latency

Then with the above, you go ahead and get a hosting services with some extra servers as backup which only be used when there are problem with the active one.

Then comes cloud computing : software as a service (SAAS).
Webmaster can access service wihout knowledge of the infrastructure behind the service which can be made up of component like applicaion, client, infrastructure, platform, service, storage.

To explain a litte more, Alvin mention that cloud computing is NOT solely grid computing, not solely utility computing not solely autonomic computer. EC2 is a mixture of the 3.

And webmaster can get webservices on demand and activate scalable computing capacity instance like a server. Launch an instance, getting raw computing power without an OS. Then comes AMI where webmaster can pick which OS to user and apps to use on top of the OS.

But with different instances (maybe hardware), Amazon also have a elastic IP feature which allow an particular IP to be used on different instances, without suffering the ill-effect of DNS propogation of conventional web hosting.

A word of warning by Alex, although claimed to be geographical dispersed, AWS servers are residing on North American soil and none in Europe or Asia.

For security of instances, basic security measures applies as per conventional servers. And S3 and EBS are storage services offered under AWS. It was shown that EBS have a 0.5% failure rate over a year as compared to 4% of commodity harddisk.

Lastly, the golden question is that should anyone migrate to a cloud solution given the many promised it have? Yes it may be cheaper, but as per any migration, consideration have to be put in place.

Off hand, the backup solution needs to be changed, to integrate EBS. And the apps needs to be restructed for redundancy and security.

I do find the meetup interesting, especially the portion on cloud computing and have a short chat with Alvin.  I was considering using AWS as a CDN for images or none dynamic content.

Finally it is nice to know people who have tired using cloud computing and willing to share their experience, which in turn will shorten the learning curve of many.  Not to mention a simple introduction to what Flex is.