I am looking for GUI interface for my web application to see the stats for the memcached. How much memcached is used, How much is free.
It will be great if it can show keys stored in memcache and show the growth of the memcache consumed in form of charts etc
I came to know about one, Buts its in very early development.
Any suggestions?
Good to have:
It will be great if it integrates smoothly with my rails application.
A separate sub-domain will work.
PHP, Python or anything other solution will work
On Heroku I have an another application running and memcache addon provides good enough interface for it. Here is the screenshot.
There are numerous tools doing what you want; a very basic one (single PHP file) is MemachedGUI; a more complex one is phpMemcachedAdmin .
There isn't "one memcached GUI to rule them all"; however, the 2 projects cited above being open source, you should be able to customize them fairly easily to do your bidding (especially with regards to graph etc.).
Do keep in mind that there isn't a way to reliably and comprehensively view all the keys stored in memcached; tools that do display that are using this trick, which is very limited.
Related
I consider myself a well trained WordPress template developer, and i recently started to read books and documents about web app frameworks, particularly Django and Ruby on Rails. I didn't know any of the two languages, but i have no problems to learn another one or two. I really don't get the real benefits of using a framework, because i feel very confident about the power of WordPress. So, can anyone tell me the real benefits of using a framework? For example, Pinterest is made using Django, but i think that i can achieve the same results with a WordPress template using Javascript and CSS3. Can anyone tell me the differences/benefits of using a framework in that particular case?
You can achieve the same frontend with Wordpress, but what you will not be able to achieve is the speed and scale - and most importantly, maintainability - of an application based on a more application-oriented architecture.
Wordpress is highly flexible, but it's also slow, and needs an awful lot of TLC to be able to operate at any kind of significant scale. Its design allows for very flexible runtime modification of behavior, but this is also a bit of a Pandora's Box, since it means that code can end up running all over the place for any given page, which makes maintenance a nightmare.
Wordpress is extremely good at being a CMS, but once you start to push it outside of those bounds, you get into trouble, and find yourself having to write your own more abstract framework that runs inside of the context of Wordpress to be able to fulfill your application's needs.
That said, if you have an application that you can build in the context of Wordpress, I'd say go for it! Wordpress can be a wonderful tool for building a proof-of-concept or MVP. If it gets you up and running, then it may be the right choice over writing a full application. However, just be aware that you're going to hit some brick walls as your product design matures and your audience grows, unless your application fits within a rather narrow set of design requirements, so long-term, you may find yourself having to move to a custom application.
Credentials: I've spent the last couple of years maintaining a Wordpress install that served over 25 million monthly uniques, and we had to get very clever to keep it running. We've since replaced it with a Rails application that serves pages somewhere on the order of 10x-30x faster, and is significantly more extensible as an application, allowing us to start exploring application potential that we really couldn't get with Wordpress.
I once made the decision while working in some start-up to choose WordPress for an advanced e-commerce, community-driven marketplace.
It was an awful decision
This is how I was feeling:
At the beginning, it was looking good - you have an amazing community, plugins for everything etc. But sooner than later I hit the wall - at it's root - WordPress is a blogging platform!
Every piece of content technically is a post.
It's really hard to create advanced item relationships
Functionalities are not consistent. Some functions work one way, while others that seems to be very similar work in a different way. Sometimes you need some weird hacks to achieve task that seem to be simple. It makes you read the docs very often to see how a function that you're using for the 1000th time is working. (However, to be honest, I need to say that the WordPress documentation is great!)
The WordPress community is doing a great job, but compared to any regular Framework there is one main difference - Frameworks are just frameworks - they're a set of tools and those tools are there to help you do your project. WordPress already is trying to be something that you might then change.
I'll never again use WordPress for anything that needs some organised, custom functionality.
I'm actually quite impressed with what people has created with wordpress - so if you want to, it is possible and good luck!
It however often feels like buying a truck and rebuilding it to be a house. There are better ways to build a house.
I want to offer a dissenting opinion, even though I upvoted the top answer.
Is Rails really special?
Rails was created by David Hansson who extracted it from Basecamp, software that's replicated in a free Wordpress plugin, WP Project Manager. I think that's a pretty good indicator that Rails developers are underestimating PHP and Wordpress.
MVC and WP
True, it doesn't follow an MVC pattern. But if you use hooks, separate logic (in plugins) from views (in templates), then you'll have good code separation. (Also hint: custom post types are like models.)
Framework vs Application
As you can see, Wordpress can be treated like an application or a framework. It is an application, with all the components you'd expect to find in a framework. Right out of the box you have security, authentication, and extendibility. And it's meant to be extended.
Scaling
WP powers 18% of the internet's websites, including TechCrunch, Smashing Magazine, and (parts of) CNN. Seems there are ways to make WP scale. Disclaimer: I have no experience working on megasites like these, so I'm offering mere conjecture.
WP Future
The current abition of the WP community is to shift WP from a CMS to a framework. I think it's a natural progression considering that all the pieces are in place. And the Wordpress community is going strong.
Not really an answer, but a hint:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_application_frameworks
As if you can replace it completely... I think it is mostly a matter of logic flow. It depends how much imperative (Ruby on Rails) vs. descriptive (WordPress) programming you intend to do.
I don't think wordpress can replace rails, because wordpress have limited set of API and support as you compare it with RoR. Though wordpress is powerful tool for blogging application, but the same effect can be achieved with rails using gems like,
Radiant CMS,
Refinery CMS,
Locomotive.
Adding the power like ttd that can be done vary easily with rails is very difficult with wordpress.
Same with authentication and authorization mechanism like devise and cancan. There is no easy option to do the same with wordpress.
Rails make the programmer's life easier. For whole web app I will always prefer to go with the rails.
Wordpress cannot replace X framework, but the two can certainly complement each other.
For example a WP front end serving up CMS content with an attractive theme is pretty hard to beat; proxy to a back end server for custom content and voila, best of both worlds. Otherwise, WP will inevitably fall short of meeting every requirement and you'll find yourself going down the square-peg-round-hole rabbit hole, a painful place indeed; that's where X framework comes in, filling in the WP gaps.
The notion that WP does not scale may have some truth to it, but for the general case, the 95%, it will handle whatever you throw at it, particularly with WP Cache or other caching plugin thrown into the mix.
Some may say, well, you can build WP with Django or RoR! Heh, heh, you first ;-)
FWIW, I avoid dynamic language frameworks in favor of their statically/strongly typed counterparts. Use WP for the bling, and static X framework for the speed/scalability/safety. Of course, that's a matter of preference, clearly some prefer runtime flexibility over compile time safety. I'm fully in the latter camp these days...
In the simplest term,, I always want to put it like this...
You can use a framework to make WordPress it self and better
But you can't use WordPress to make a framework
Wordpress is a great CMS any way
Pros
1. We can easily set up a website using free themes and plugins
2. There are numerous number of plugins to extend our website functionality
3. Excellent Community support
4. The CMS uses PHP and MySQL, somewhat easy to lean
Cons
1. Updating plugins and themes regularly.
2. Slow
3. Malicious files can be easily injected.
Recently I have been dabbling in Ruby on Rails by learning it through Michael Hartl's tutorial and various other resources on the net. I'm quite impressed with it and have a number of ideas for applications I want to write with it.
Heroku seems like a really nice option for deploying these applications - it's smooth and extremely easy to set up, which is great. Something that I'm not clear on, however, is the type of projects Heroku is best suited for. This might seem like a subjective question, but keep in mind that I am asking from an entirely technical aspect (for instance, "Heroku is most used for X because of Y"), trying to figure out which option would work best given the type of projects I'm interested in.
With that said, I have three basic types of applications I'd like to write:
A personal site with a blog front page and several content pages
A community site that acts as a repository for Illustrator ".ai" files with forums and possibly a wiki
An image host with forums
For each of these projects, which would be best: Heroku, a traditional host with RoR support, or a different cloud host with RoR support?
Heroku is designed for any kind of webapp really. It is designed to scale well depending of your needs.
If you want to host user files you will have to use an outside service like amazon S3, because heroku is not designed to upload files directly in the application. Which is a good practice.
http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/slug-size
http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/s3
http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
We have a very simple function (We look something up from a third party database and return an answer. It's literally five lines of code.) We would like to offload this task from our main server because we expect a high volume of traffic for this one function and would like to optimize it.
We are thinking about testing the promise of many cloud/PaaS providers, where they handle scaling and performance responsibilities.
We're most interested in Rails environments, but are curious to hear experiences from others about any company in the space.
Here are the PaaS companies we found that supports Rails:
1) Heroku
2) DotCloud
3) Duostack
Questions:
1) Do you know of other Rails-specific companies? Also feel free to list non-Rails companies since we're interested in following other companies in case they eventually provide Rails support.
2) How has your experience been with these companies?
Foreword and disclaimer: I work for DotCloud; so the following might be biased. You've been warned.
DotCloud could be interesting for you if you like the following features:
run something else than Ruby (what about some Django or Pylons code talking with your SQL DB? Or even some PHP blog like WordPress or Drupal, using the same user authentication database?)
experiment with databases like Redis or MongoDB, or background ruby workers, without paying for add-ons
SSH access, crontab access (without requiring an add-on)
cheaper workers (I didn't come up with this one; some of our users coming from the Heroku world told us that workers were insanely expensive there)
Duostack is indeed very nice if you want to mix specifically Rails and Node.js. I've been told that they had awesome auto-configuration facilities.
Finally, if you only plan to do Rails and nothing else, ever, you might as well stick with Heroku since they've been in that business for a while, and are probably more mature than the first two of the batch.
Shameless plug: DotCloud is offering a beta test drive; so if you want to see what it looks like, just subscribe to the beta and you will be quickly enough be able to see for yourself. Heroku has a free tier as well.
You could add EngineYard in the mix - but i'd be inclined to use Heroku as my first choice, Dotcloud second (it's a newish product, and is very good but still in development)
If you want more control over your app/servers or want to run it on any cloud or your own infrastructure without having to download/deploy anything, you can try Cloud 66 (www.cloud66.com)
Disclaimer: I work for Cloud 66
A lot has changed on the scene since this question was asked. We recently looked into these services and settled on Heroku, but even more recently decided to continue managing my own deployments directly on EC2. Here are some points not mentioned in the other answers.
Heroku
Now supports much more than just ruby
Has really great-looking support for PostgreSQL
Uses LXC for process containers, like DotCloud
DotCloud
Is now Docker, and is putting a lot of manpower into developing docker.io
Doesn't have a free tier any more
I'm not sure if DotCloud is using Docker internally or not, since the docs say explicitly it isn't production-ready yet.
Our decision to stick with plain EC2 was motivated by the fact that it's cheaper and affords a lot more flexibility. For example, we use local-only http servers behind our public server to do some of our request processing, which doesn't really fit into the PaaS models out there. We would have had to reimplement all our back-end components as redis workers, and pay for them as additional dynos. The fact that Amazon RDS now supports PostgreSQL was also a compelling factor. Incidentally, Amazon has a full-stack PaaS offering as well, Elastic Beanstalk.
Just stumbled upon the question. There are similar ones around here. The problem is also: The PaaS scene is changing very quickly. New vendors are popping in every week or so.
Nowadays OpenShift from Red Hat might also be mentioned here as a Ruby PaaS.
OFFTOPIC + shameless plug: I have compiled a list of PHP PaaS here: http://blog.fortrabbit.com/comparing-cloud-hosting-platforms/
How can i write a cloud-aware application? e.g. an application that takes benefit of being deployed on cloud. Is it same as an application that runs or a vps/dedicated server? if not then what are the differences? are there any design changes? What are the procedures that i need to take if i am to migrate an application to cloud-aware?
Also i am about to implement a web application idea which would need features like security, performance, caching, and more importantly free. I have been comparing some frameworks and found that django has least RAM/CPU usage and works great in prefork+threaded mode, but i have also read that django based sites stop to respond with huge load of connections. Other frameworks that i have seen/know are Zend, CakePHP, Lithium/Cake3, CodeIgnitor, Symfony, Ruby on Rails....
So i would leave this to your opinion as well, suggest me a good free framework based on my needs.
Finally thanks for reading the essay ;)
I feel a matrix moment coming on... "what is the cloud? The cloud is all around us, a prison for your program..." (what? the FAQ said bring your sense of humour...)
Ok so seriously, what is the cloud? It depends on the implementation but usual features include scalable computing resource and a charge per cpu-hour, storage area etc. So yes, it is a bit like developing on your VPS/a normal server.
As I understand it, Google App Engine allows you to consume as much as you want. The back-end resource management is done by Google and billed to you and you pay for what you use. I believe there's even a free threshold.
Amazon EC2 exposes an API that actually allows you to add virtual machine instances (someone correct me please if I'm wrong) having pre-configured them, deploy another instance of your web app, talk between private IP ranges if you wish (slicehost definitely allow this). As such, EC2 can allow you to act like a giant load balancer on the front-end passing work off to a whole number of VMs on the back end, or expose all that publicly, take your pick. I'm not sure on the exact detail because I didn't build the system but that's how I understand it.
I have a feeling (but I know least about Azure) that on Azure, resource management is done automatically, for you, by Microsoft, based on what your app uses.
So, in summary, the cloud is different things depending on which particular cloud you choose. EC2 seems to expose an API for managing resource, GAE and Azure appear to be environments which grow and shrink in the background based on your use.
Note: I am aware there are certain constraints developing in GAE, particularly with Java. In a minute, I'll edit in another thread where someone made an excellent comment on one of my posts to this effect.
Edit as promised, see this thread: Cloud Agnostic Architecture?
As for a choice of framework, it really doesn't matter as far as I'm concerned. If you are planning on deploying to one of these platforms you might want to check framework/language availability. I personally have just started Django and love it, having learnt python a while ago, so, in my totally unbiased opinion, use Django. Other developers will probably recommend other things, based on their preferences. What do you know? What are you most comfortable with? What do you like the most? I'd go with that. I chose Django purely because I'm not such a big fan of PHP, I like Python and I was comfortable with the framework when I initially played around with it.
Edit: So how do you write cloud-aware code? You design your software in such a way it fits on one of these architectures. Again, see the cloud-agnostic thread for some really good discussion on ways of doing this. For example, you might talk to some services on GAE which scale. That they are on GAE (example) doesn't really matter, you use loose coupling ideas. In essence, this is just a step up from the web service idea.
Also, another feature of the cloud I forgot to mention is the idea of CDN's being provided for you - some cloud implementations might move your data around the globe to make it more efficient to serve, or just because that's where they've got space. If that's an issue, don't use the cloud.
I cannot answer your question - I'm not experienced in such projects - but I can tell you one thing... both CakePHP and CodeIgniter are designed for PHP4 - in other words: for really old technology. And it seems nothing is going to change in their case. Symfony (especially 2.0 version which is still in heavy beta) is worth considering, but as I said on the very beginning - I can not support this with my own experience.
For designing applications for deployment for the cloud, the main thing to consider if recoverability. If your server is terminated, you may lose all of your data. If you're deploying on Amazon, I'd recommend putting all data that you need persisted onto an Elastic Block Storage (EBS) device. This would be data like user generated content/files, the database files and logs. I also use the EBS snapshot on a 5 day rotation so that's backed up itself. That said, I've had a cloud server up on AWS for over a year without any issues.
As for frameworks, I'm giving Grails a try at the minute and I'm quite enjoying it. Built to be syntactically similar to Rails but runs on the JVM. It means you can take advantage of all the Java goodness, like threading, concurrency and all the great libraries out there to build your web application.
What would you suggest as the best server stack for a dedicated server which needs to host Rails SaaS application (not a lot of traffic but need to keep options open for future).
Regardless of your application, you're probably going to want certain standard components:
nginx/passenger will work for small apps or large apps. You should use it.
Unless you have a specific reason to use something else, you should use MySQL since the vast majority of the Rails community uses it and you will be able to get better support.
You should have memcached running right away, even if you don't use it for much yet. You're going to want to be able to seamlessly add caching as it's needed.
You're going to want to have a process for setting up a new server that is fully automated. That way, if you need to spin up a second server, it's trivial. If you ssh into a box to configure it, this means that if you need another server in a pinch (or the first server gets corrupted), you're going to need to remember all the things you did. Not a good place to be in an emergency.
You should be on the very latest version of Ruby on Rails, and upgrade frequently. Keep an eye on deprecations and changes and make the suggested changes as early as possible. When Rails 3 is released, use it.
Engine Yard, where I work, uses an open source tool called chef to manage our automated deployment solution. That's probably a good option.
As ever with a question that broad, it depends. Some things to think about:
What does the application do?
Does the application use any database vendor-specific SQL?
What are the availability requirements?
What are the performance requirements?
How much data will there be?
Which server stacks do you or the person who will be administering it have experience of?
What is your budget?
One thing I can say with complete certainty is that you don't want to be using Windows because Rails work best on a Linux/UNIX stack.
A lot of it depends on your needs. If the model isn't very complex and/or your traffic is fairly low, you can probably get away with apache, mongrel, and sqlite on some *nix.
If you start seeing performance issues, you can add some memcached into the mix, upgrade (relatively painlessly) to mysql, and use a different server (passenger/nginx).
There are also alternate ruby implementations that have some performance boosting changes. Rubninous and jRuby come to mind.