Back after a long time.

The last few months have been very hectic and I couldn't post anything onto my blog. I worked quite a bit on Google App Engine, did some experimental projects using LAMP, messed around with Amazon EC2 and S3, researched on virtualization and tried to use CouchDB.

While mobile computing is very interesting, I feel it is also important to step out of the silo that mobile programming sometimes creates. Usability and performance are important in mobile computing but scalability is not a big factor. I really wanted to try out something far grander in scale than the iPhone and Android apps that I continuously work on.

Google App Engine projects were really fun. I churned out quite a few apps (which we use internally within our company) in a very short span of time. But I think it still has some way to go before enterprises can really leverage the platform. GAE comes with a lot of limitations. For example, you cannot have a data structure (e.g., variable) larger than 1MB in size or you'll get a memory error. While that is not an issue in most cases, I found it to be severely limiting while working on an enterprise class application. GAE has a lot of other idiosyncrasies which Aral Balkan has really nailed in his blog post on the subject.

I knew of EC2 and S3 for a while now but I never really had an excuse to try it out. The 1MB limitation was a perfect opportunity for me to try out AWS. At first, I found it very intimidating. There were tools that could easily help me get started with GAE. Getting started with EC2 on the other hand was not so easy. But after a couple of days of very intense reading, I had my first EC2 instance up and running. I am still learning the nuts and bolts of EC2, but with the release of RDS, I am positive I will enjoy the experience thoroughly.

I just started with CouchDB and haven't really done anything useful with it yet. While I am not new to a non-relational DB, I find using REST calls for db operations very interesting. I am yet to think of why I would want to use CouchDB over MySQL.

It has been a very interesting three months or so for me. My only regret has been that I could not really use these technologies/platforms earlier. But, like the idiom goes, better late than never.