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Move Over, HTTP. Say ‘Hello World’ to SPDY

By Michael Calore November 12th, 2009 Categories: Servers, Web Basics

Google plans to introduce a new protocol for web transactions it says is more than 50 percent faster than HTTP.

A post on Google’s Chromium blog describes the new protocol, SPDY, pronounced “Speedy”:

SPDY is at its core an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web. It is designed specifically for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression.

The Chromium team, which is in charge of developing the Chrome browser and its associated technologies, reports that SPDY has been able to load web pages 55 percent faster than the HTTP protocol in lab conditions using simulated home-network connections. The team says its goal is to make SPDY eventually run twice as fast as HTTP.

HTTP is the language currently used by servers and browsers for the vast majority of common tasks on the web. When you request a web page or a file from a server, chances are your browser sends that request using HTTP. The server answers using HTTP, too. This is why “http” appears at the beginning of most web addresses.

So, Google’s proposal would involve rewriting the web’s most commonly used and baked-in transaction method.

“HTTP has served the web incredibly well,” the post’s authors write. “We want to continue building on the web’s tradition of experimentation and optimization, to further support the evolution of websites and browsers.”

If such a massive shift were to ever take place (and nobody’s promising it will at this point), it would require a whole lot of buy-in from outside Google. To that end, the company is releasing its early-stage documentation and code for SPDY along with a call for feedback.

It may seem like a brash move, but the Chromium team seems to enjoy ruffling feathers. In September, the same group released the Chrome Frame plug-in for Internet Explorer which essentially embeds Google’s browser inside Microsoft’s, giving the ability to render websites that IE wouldn’t normally be able to handle.

To contribute to the SPDY discussion, visit the Chromium Google Group.

Image: Warner Brothers

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Cool Tutorial: Django in the Real World

By Michael Calore July 22nd, 2009 Categories: Programming, Servers

Django’s big sell is that it’s easy.

Compared to other open-source (or even proprietary) frameworks for building specialized, database-driven websites, Django makes the core tasks remarkably easy and fast to complete. A developer with working knowledge of databases and Python can get a site up and running in less than an hour.

But once your code is written, what comes next?

That question forms the basis of a talk given by Jacob Kaplan-Moss, one of Django’s lead developers, at the OSCON Open Source Convention in San Jose, California Tuesday. His slides are now online (PDF, 1.7MB)

The concentration is on testing, staging and deployment. There are also recommendations for fine-tuning performance. And even if you don’t know Python or if you’ve never used Django, the presentation is still helpful since it’s full of general advice about building and deploying web applications.

Also, there’s a great series of tutorials hosted by the Django Project itself, and there’s a beginner’s Django tutorial right here on Webmonkey.

Illustration: Stefan Imhoff

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Register.com Victimized by DDoS Attack

By Michael Calore April 3rd, 2009 Categories: Business, Servers

Register.com is having a rough week. The popular domain registrar and website hosting company has been having coughing fits for a few days. Service has been intermittent, with some users complaining of outages on the company’s web servers as well as its e-mail and data storage services.

Turns out the problem was the result of a DDoS attack.

Today, this e-mail was sent out, and the company posted the same note on its website:

For the past three days Register.com has been experiencing intermittent service disruptions as a result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack ��� an intentionally malicious flooding of our systems from various points across the internet. We know the disruption of business this has caused our customers is unacceptable, and we are working round the clock to combat it. (For more information about DDoS attacks, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack.)

While we are still under attack, our counter-measures are currently minimizing the disruption to your services. We are using all available means to halt this criminal attack on our business and our customers’ business.

We are committed to updating you in as timely manner as possible, please continue to check back here for additional updates or go to www.twitter.com/Register_com.

Thank you for your patience.


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PDC 2008: SensorMap Is Some Hot (and Cool) Tech

By Michael Calore October 29th, 2008 Categories: Events, Servers

Los Angeles — Microsoft has already left its mark on software, consumer devices, gaming and the web. Next, the company is turning its attention to green technology, environmental research and effects climate change.

At its annual Professional Developers Conference, the company debuted some new distributed computing technology the Microsoft Research team has created to collect data on energy use, transportation efficiency and global climate change.

During Wednesday morning’s keynote, Microsoft Research’s Feng Zhao showed off the pocket-sized devices his MSR SenseWeb team created to monitor any number of environmental factors. Microsoft has deployed hundreds of these sensors, each no bigger than a cell phone, around downtown Seattle, Singapore and Taipei, in the mountains near Davos, Switzerland and glaciers in Juneau, Alaska.

Each sensor records information about wind speed, temperature, humidity and other metrics. The devices are customized for each location — the sensors in Davos are connected to high-tension power lines, and they measure shortwave radiation. The ones in Seattle have cameras and study traffic patterns. The sensors on the Alaskan glacier measure water discharge.

Anyone can go to the SensorMap website to dig in to the sensor data, view time-based graphs and generate custom reports. The site will remain a public source of data for tracking changes in the environment.

As Microsoft Research’s director Rick Rashid quipped, “We’re using the cloud to keep track of clouds.”

It seems purely altruistic, but there’s a practical reason for Microsoft’s investment — the company is using the same tech to monitor the data centers which will power its new Windows Azure cloud computing platform. As the company builds the physical infrastructure for Azure, it’s also been installing sensors and feeding data into what it calls the Data Center Genome project. The sensors measure energy usage, heat and power distribution and efficiency within the warehouse-sized server complexes.

Zhao showed what the Genome data looks like. He revealed that hundreds of sensors had been deployed throughout the Los Angeles convention center, which is hosting the conference. On the stage’s jumbo screen, he showed a satellite photo of the building with a overlaying grid marking the energy sensor array.

He played back the collected data as an animated heat map, sped up over time, to show heat rising in parts of the building as attendees filed in to view the previous day’s Windows 7 keynote, then fanned out into the sessions and the expo hall afterwards.

It gave a detailed view of exactly how efficiently the air conditioning system cooled the building — including huge blue spots where the HVAC vents were pumping chilled air into areas of the hall that were entirely empty and devoid of people for hours.


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Opera MAMA Reports Web Standard Usage

By Scott Loganbill October 15th, 2008 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Servers, Software & Tools

Opera has announced the Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA), a search engine for web developers looking for backend analytics. Basically, the reports are regular search results, but with the focus on things like the number of <font> tags used on the web, or the shocking fact that less than 5% of websites pass the W3C’s validation test.

The wealth of data was culled from 3,509,180 URLs over 3,011,668 domains. All of this data will help you win geek bar fights over internet trivia questions like:

Q: What is the most popular web server on the internet?
A: Apache. Apache serves about 50.76 percent over 2,011,088 domains (67.72 percent). IIS: 35.84 percent over 769,375 domains (25.91 percent).

Q: How many web developers are good enough to write code that passes W3C validation?
A: 145,009 out of 3,509,180 URLs passed validation ��� only 4.13 percent.

Q: Which country uses Ajax the least?
A: Japan showed the least usage of XMLHttpRequest, while Norway (Opera’s home country) exhibited the highest usage rates at 10.1 percent.

Otherwise, this is a great source of data to help drive standards forward. In many ways, standards bodies were moving on blindly and adding cool features as they are developed. Perhaps with the plethora of data Opera provides on the web, decisions can be made on practical numbers.

The capability to run searches of your own isn’t available to users, but the key findings report is available on Opera’s developer’s site. The reports include many of the most popular questions.

Luckily for us, Opera has offered to run some reports for Webmonkey.

So you tell us: What questions you have for the MAMA oracle? We’ll send them to Opera and post them later. Leave your questions in comments.

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Tags: analytics, browser, mama, Opera
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Apple Fails to Patch DNS ‘Cache Poisoning’ Attack

By Scott Gilbertson July 29th, 2008 Categories: Servers

barbed wireThe previously hypothetical DNS cache poisoning bug you’ve no doubt heard about has made its way into the wild. That isn’t all that surprising given that there are no less than three publicly available exploits, which have been downloaded some ten thousand times.

What’s disturbing isn’t that the code is in the wild and potentially on your DNS server. No the problems is that, despite a concerted effort by vendors, there are still countless unpatched servers out there.

Apple especially has failed to protect its users. Even the normally Apple-supportive Tidbits blog has called the company out for failing to patch its OS X Server software.

The really sad thing in Apple’s case is that Internet Systems Consortium BIND DNS server, which is what OS X Server uses, was one of the first patched systems made available. Apple has simply declined to pass the patch on to its users leaving them vulnerable to DNS cache poisoning and other attacks.

So how do you know if your ISP has patched your DNS Server? Well, the short answer is you probably don’t. You could dig through and see if your ISP has made an announcement. Or maybe call customer service (good luck with that).

Or you could just replace your DNS server with one that you know is secure. It isn’t hard to do at all and we’ve got a new OpenDNS tutorial to walk you through the few steps it takes to setup OpenDNS as your DNS servers. OpenDNS isn’t affected by this latest bug and as an added bonus it’s generally faster than what your ISP uses.

[via Slashdot]

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Tags: security
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Microsoft Dons Sheep Suit, Joins Open Source Foundation

By Scott Gilbertson July 28th, 2008 Categories: Business, Servers, Software & Tools

LinuxfudMicrosoft has decided to hide the teeth for bit and joined the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) in an attempt to convey some goodwill to the open source community. The Apache Software Foundation is one of the largest organizations in the open-source world and Microsoft’s new platinum membership nets the ASF $100,000 annually.

Of course there’s some good reasons to question Microsoft’s motives. As Bruce Perens, a well-known open-source advocate, writes on Slashdot, “there’s much reason for caution.”

For instance, Microsoft was once working very hard to mount a legal attack designed to sue the entire open source world out of existence. Obviously that didn’t come the pass on a large scale, and Microsoft now appears to differentiate between open source (potentially benign to its interests) and Linux (a threat). Still, it isn’t hard to see why open source advocates remain wary of the company.

Perens writes:

Historically, Microsoft helped to fund SCO’s attack on Linux — we have court testimony under oath on that. They briefed HP on their plans to sue the the developers of Sendmail, Linux and other programs — we have the HP memo, which HP admitted was real. Their agreement with Novell was calculated to break the spirit of the GPL without violating the letter, so they’ve shown they are happy to cheat the developer community when it’s to their advantage. More recently, they have cheated every way they could in getting Office Open XML through ISO, even having one of their executives pose as officer of a national standards organization.

Perens suspects that Microsoft may be trying buy its way into the open-source world to in an effort to gain open-source credibility so when it comes to deals with government agencies and large corporations, the company can pass itself off as open source friendly.

Their increased involvement in Open Source organizations means that they will be taken as a member of the Open Source community when they speak with national legislators. This is terrible for us, because it means they’ll be able to short-circuit our work to protect Open Source from software patents by speaking to government as an insider in our communities.

What do you think? Has Microsoft genuinely had a change of heart or is this classic case of one hand shaking with open source while the knife-wielding other hand sneaks around back?

[via Slashdot]

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Version Control Smackdown: Git vs Subversion vs Mercurial

By Michael Calore July 7th, 2008 Categories: Programming, Servers

Get three programmers into a discussion about which code versioning system they prefer, and you’re guaranteed to end up with some ruffled feathers. I mean, the choice is obvious, right?

The truth is that each of the most popular content versioning systems has its ups and downs. Git handles branches and merges well, and it’s very easy to set up a new repository. Subversion has the best set of client tools, but checkins and checkouts are faster (and smaller) with Mercurial.

Which source control system is the best? Cast your vote in the list below. If you’d like to nominate a new candidate for the title, scroll down to add it to the list. Want to argue your case? Leave a comment.

Show entries that are: hot | new | top-rated or submit your own

Submit an Entry

While you can submit as many entries for your favorite source control system as you want, you can only submit one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.

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Gnip Makes Data Portability ‘Suck Less’

By Scott Loganbill July 1st, 2008 Categories: Programming, Servers, Software & Tools

Data portability service Gnip (pronounced guh-nip), announced Tuesday, promises to make our Ajax-filled days even better. Developers have been scurrying for ways to efficiently consolidate and streamline data portability, and Gnip promises to do exactly that.

Web applications have typically relied on requesting data in cycles to get its information. Gnip promises to change the model in favor of one that is more push-oriented. Translation: It means getting “live” data, like email or stock quotes, quicker than ever. Gnip would provide data to clients by hosting as a middle man and providing host data asynchronously.

Even better, the service will complement web developers preferences, providing the data by translating the data polling standard of your choice. For example, RSS, ATOM, REST, XMPP or COMET are all promised to be supported.

Data providers and partners signed up for now include Digg, Flickr, Urban Dictionary, Del.icio.us and Six Apart. Currently, while the data is provided, data polling translation and identification will come later. Gnip has provided libraries for Perl, PHP, Java, Python and Ruby for now.

It’s awesome news for those in the business of making web applications. Retrieving information in the past has been a taxing process for both servers and applications.


Tags: data portability, gnip
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Search Engine Robots Agree Over Standards

By Scott Loganbill June 4th, 2008 Categories: Platforms & APIs, Servers, Uncategorized

How I would like to be a fly on the wall during Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google meetings like the one where they agreed upon Robots Exclusion Protocols (REP). Do they trade barbs, quips and underhanded comments? In my imagination, the gathering is much like a Three Stooges episode.

However these meetings actually go, Web Developers reap the benefits when the three competitors agree as evidenced by the announcement of a standard robots.com protocol.

Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google each announced their involvement in the protocol over the past week along with documentation describing the protocol.

Search engines gather their information by creating tiny programs, or robots, that scan the internet for information. When the programs detect a web server, they copy all files in the server’s directories to their local cache, scan their data, and categorize them for inclusion into search results. Robots.txt is a file that is placed in web server directories that allow permission to the directory to search engines. If a robots.txt file is absent in the directory, the robot automatically assumes you are allowing the contents of that directory to be accessed by search engine.

The REP standardizes how the robots.txt file is interpreted by search engines. It allows web developers more control over privacy and how their data will appear.

All parties benefit by the new agreed-upon protocol because inconsistencies between search engines are erased. Now robots.txt files will be honored equally among the biggest search engines, and presumably by the rest of web-crawling robot community.


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