One of my biggest gripes with Java (and all the languages that run on the JVM) is getting my project setup and building it. Maven is not my favorite, and ant..well..I don't like it either. Fortunately, if you want to start a new project in Scala, there is a great build tool available that takes a lot of the pain out of project management and building - SBT, simple-build-tool. sbt is a simple build tool for Scala projects that aims to do the basics well....

SOAP, Background Tasks, and AJAX Recently in Rails I’ve been interacting with various SOAP services and running them in the background with Workling. I needed to relay the SOAP response to the client’s web browser, so I decided to use AJAX to poll the status of my background tasks. This is great if you have < 30 second background tasks running, but don’t want to block a user (and a request)....

The Problem I've been running a mobile GPS tracking service, MoosTrax (formerly BlackBerry Tracker), for a few years and have encountered a large amount of data in the process. A user's phone sends its location to the server and it is stored in a MySQL database. Each "location" entry is stored as a single row in a table. Right now there are approximately 12 million rows in the location table, and things are getting slow now, as a full table scan can take ~3-4 minutes on my limited hardware....

libactor is now available on google code. Check it out: http://code.google.com/p/libactor/ If you have any problems or ideas, post them there! Chris

Check out some tutorials on various topics: Pylons Pylons Worker Threads CouchDB and Pylons, Getting Started <li><a href="http://chrismoos.com/2009/02/21/couchdb-and-pylons-user-registration-and-login/">CouchDB and Pylons: User Registration and Login</a></li> Erlang Building an Erlang chat server with Comet – Part 1 Building an Erlang chat server with Comet – Part 2 Building an Erlang chat server with Comet – Part 3

Recently I’ve been really interested in functional, concurrent programming languages, such as Erlang. This prompted me to have some fun in C, and try to implement a simple library that is based on the Actor Model. Right now it is usable, although it may not be ready for production. It uses pthreads and the library handles all of the threading issues, so you don’t have to worry about any of it at all....

Colloquy is a great IRC client for Mac, as well as the iPhone. Currently, to run Colloquy on the iPhone you must purchase the mobile version from the App Store. The other option is to download the source and build it yourself, but you must be a registered iPhone developer to run it on an actual iPhone. Also, if you intend to use push notifications (via the Colloquy ZNC plugin), you must have a push certificate as well....

Lately I have been really interested in voice over IP, I think there is a lot of power in it. I was using Asterisk, but I’ve moved onto a much better and more powerful solution, FreeSWITCH. I was playing with it recently and decided a Caller ID spoofing interface would be fun. When the following script is ran, it will prompt you for an access code, and if it is correct, it will let you specify a number to spoof, and a number to call....

You can see a live demo of the following tutorial here. Overview In the last part, we implemented the first version of our chat server. Now that the framework is down, we can start adding some more features. You can find the source for this tutorial here UPDATE 7/2/11: The source code is also available here: https://github.com/chrismoos/erl_chat_tutorial. You can checkout the 0.2 tag. In this part, we will add the following features:...

You can see a live demo of the following tutorial at chat.tech9computers.com Getting into the code In the previous part, I introduced the chat system and how it should work. Now we are going to write the chat_postoffice, chat_mailbox, chat_room, and chat_web modules. Before you read download the source for this tutorial here. and dedicate about 20 minutes to read through this tutorial, because it's kind of long (sorry). UPDATE 7/2/11: The source code is also available here: https://github....