
Adam Wiggins on Heroku
Heroku's Adam Wiggins talks about how Heroku, Add-Ons, Ruby, and how Heroku manages to work around Ruby's inefficiencies using Erlang and other languages.
Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community

Heroku's Adam Wiggins talks about how Heroku, Add-Ons, Ruby, and how Heroku manages to work around Ruby's inefficiencies using Erlang and other languages.
The Unladen Swallow project that aims to speed up Python has proposed to be merged into mainstream Python. One of Unladen Swallow's goals was to remove the GIL; a new implementation of Python's GIL by Antoine Pitrou will be fairer and less intrusive on multicore CPUs. Also: Squeak Smalltalk has been ported to Android.
The ConcurrentDictionary is a cornerstone in .NET 4.0’s greatly increased emphasis on parallel and concurrent programming. But while vastly superior to what we have seen in the past, it isn’t a panacea and developers need to study its semantics carefully.

Lan Vuong shows how to optimize the performance of an application by leveraging the write-behind caching pattern which sends batch updates to the back-end database asynchronously within a user configurable interval of time, instead of doing sychronous write-through updates typical in web apps.

In part two of InfoQ's interview with the FlightCaster team, we discuss scaling Rails on Heroku, the problems of integrating data from multiple providers and mobile smartphone applications.

In this presentation from the JVM Languages Summit 2009, Cliff Click discusses the Von Neumann architecture, CISC vs RISC, the rise of multicore, Instruction-Level Parallelism (ILP), pipelining, out-of-order dispatch, static vs dynamic ILP, performance impact of cache misses, memory performance, memory vs CPU caching, examples of memory/CPU cache interaction, and tips for improving performance.

Avi Bryant explains the iterative process that led to the concept, implementation, and UI of Trendly (http://trendly.com/ ), using Smalltalk, Javascript, Ruby and Java in the process.

Doug Lea talks to InfoQ about the evolution of the Fork/Join Framework, the new features planned for java.util.concurrent in Java 7, and the "Extra 166" package. The interview goes on to explore some of the hardware and language changes that are impacting concurrent programming, and the effect the increasing prevalence of alternative languages in the JVM are having on library design.

In this interview taped at FutureRuby, Luke Galea talks about his experience with building sites using Ruby and Merb as well as integrating them using Erlang in the messaging layer.