Thursday, July 31, 2008

TaF Public release

We are now releasing Tell-A-Friend widget for public use.

One of the features that makes this widget stand apart from rest of the widgets is that, if you wish to change the design of the buttons (be it the color, size or appearance), you don't have to embed a new or modified code in your webpage/blog. This helps save a lot of copy-paste exercise, which is kinda a welcome feature for lazy bums like me. All one has to do it to go to the accounts page, choose the kinda button they like, save the changes and then its all Eureka. All the changes are instantly reflected in the blogsite/webpage where TaF is embedded. Now, isn't this something cool ??

Apart from wiring a few connectors in the TaF widget, I worked on the analytics collection module. This was a pretty good learning exercise. I got to know more about the Apache log4j utility. These Apache guys are real bonds. They write some pretty good stuff.

For analytics collections, I wrote a custom JDBC appender to log all data. This has many advantages.

1) It consumes only a limited database connections.
2) Requests are served on first-come-first-serve basis. So, everything is sequential in nature in accordance to time. (log4j uses a queue)

But then, there are possible pitfalls too !!
Imagine that there are many requests, this will increase the queue size, thus increasing the response time. As of now, we have tested our infrastructure for traffics much more than we are expecting. If anyhow, response time does gets a beating, switching to a distributed system would be a possible solution which I suppose would require a bit of tweaking.

May be I will soon write another post on how to write custom JDBC appender and on analytics collection framework of works.