So, Coda is out and it has been pretty well received. For good reason. It’s a very elegant-looking app, with nice touches all over the place. Panic really knows how to exploit the look and feel of OS X and the core technologies beneath. Put simply: it oozes Mac goodness from every corner.
I want to use it, I really do. However. I don’t need it.
You see, ever since I switched from PHP to Rails I only touch the server for little increments at a time, and no longer work directly on it (man, those were[n’t] the days!) Even when developing comps from Photoshop to XHTML/CSS, I mainly stay within my current editor and switch back and forth between Webkit.
(As an aside, I really like the bundled Panic Sans font. Appears to be some variation of Bitstream Vera Mono, possibly with the underscores tweaked.)
So all this talk about Rails (not) scaling got me thinking. If the database is the next bottleneck after you’ve beefed up your pack of Mongrels, just remove it—and replace it with Twitter!
That’s right. A Twitter-based ActiveRecord store.
I expect the plugin to work something like this:
development:
adapter: mysql
database: sockr_development
username: root
password:
host: localhost
test:
adapter: mysql
database: sockr_test
username: root
password:
host: localhost
production:
adapter: twitter
username: sockr_production
password: web2point0h
(Note here how I’m still using a traditional RDBMS for development and test environments. Kicking in Twitter here would be quite silly, as we don’t need the scalability for just our local user as we’re developing. We really need it for production!)
That’s it! The plugin would take care of marshaling your ActiveRecord objects into 140 byte chunks and sending it off to Twitter HQ for cold storage.
Keep your eyes peeled for the plugin, coming soon!
