Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Easy Dart on Google Compute Engine (GCE)

TL;DR;

 One-line  download SDK and install command for current user would be:
curl -L "https://docs.google.com/uc?authuser=0&id=0B1i4NDqKFLYJM3NlYnRhLXFfXzQ&export=download" |sh

Long version:

Actually Dart could be run on Google Compute Engine instances as described on this article.  There you also can find other details on how to configure GCE instances.

But the problem is that you need to recompile Dart, as SDK provided on Dart downloads page does not run on instances provided by GCE at this moment (Debian 7 and CentOS 6). If you will try, you'll get this response:
/dart: /lib64/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.15' not found (required by ./dart)
/dart: /lib64/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.14' not found (required by ./dart)
But when you want to have your instance up and running quick, probably you don't want to spend instance's resources on recompile as it will cost you additional money.

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Go CMS for Google Apps Engine

Tl;dr


Background

Not so long ago I've starting digging into Go language and found it very attractive for server-side development. The reasons are:

  1. It is fast ("near C performance")
  2. It is garbage collected
  3. Syntax is though little bit strange (comparable to Dart), but still quite easy to learn
  4. Easy to start
Also Go is supported by Google Apps Engine.

Speaking about performance, I should mention cost. If you're in "cloud", then you should think about "cost per request" - how much resources were used to serve request. So if application is faster, it should be cheaper in case if you're using real "cloud" platform, such as GAE that can automatically scale your application.

Also because Go in compiled language, instance startup is much faster then Java/Python.   


The Idea