What's it all about, Alfie?

Today has been a mixed bag... I did get a little development done on the ticker plants - just a few little things to polish up some things, but I also had hour-long design meetings (not bad), and then multi-hour-long debugging meetings where there was no hope of actually finding a problem because the developers had so little experience developing on linux that there was no hope of a successful test, and they really just needed to understand the proper way to edit/compile/test code.

The design meeting was really kind of interesting. We have The Broker, and it's been an erlang process, and a Java process, but it's always been centralized. I mentioned today that I wondered why it wasn't using Distributed Erlang, and let the entire brokerage system sit on all the machines and handle everything in a more distributed manner. Let erlang handle the registration, and the message passing. We can use J interface (Java library) and el (C library) to make our server applications appear as distributed erlang nodes. This makes it much easier to do all the things the Broker does.

Sure, the clients still can use sockets to connect to the Broker - or should I say A Broker, where we can have one running on each server in the server room. The client (defined as processes that aren't nodes in the distributed erlang system) can then use the socket interface to connect to a Broker and work as it always has, but the wrinkle is that it's only really brokering his traffic. This gets rid of a lot of the problems we had faced in the past - and went to great lengths to try and solve.

So much gets easier if the main components of the system are all distributed erlang nodes. Very nice solution to the problem.

The debugging session was only slightly productive, and ultimately disappointing. The code was compiled on CentOS5 and run on Ubuntu 10.04.1 - I'm not at all surprised that things broke. Far too different a version of libc, gcc - everything, really. We couldn't even get the code to build on Ubuntu. They need to step back, build the code on the box they are going to run it on, and then move forward.

It's slow going sometimes.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 16th, 2011 at 4:54 pm and is filed under Coding, Cube Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.