Just a quick post, thought I’d let the world know that I’m changing the main goals I had for readinfra. I sat down yesterday and started to plan out bits of how I was going to do readinfra, what the design was going to look like among things when I thought to myself, I’ve not actually checked out if someone else has even done this. Turns out quite a few have (typical), one that stuck out was readbag, it’s written with google app engine too, nice eh? So with simlar services out there I’ve decided to make readinfra about hitting some nice goals I’d like to achive.

For one I’m going to develop the site using the merb framework so theres a goal already get good at merb and maybe become one of those big sites using merb? Other gloals….well shall I just list them?

1. Simple, clean and fast design!

I’ve decided to keep the design very simple and clean, as too focus more on your links and content instead of fancy graphics. Also by being clean I’m hoping that the design will be fast! Not having lots of images and making sure I cut right down on bloated javascript prettyness I’m hoping it’ll make the site snappy.

2. Rapid development

I want to get this done quick, I’ve read about quite a few of these modern type services being done in 24 hours! That’s not my goal as I don’t think I’d manage that (far to busy… yes…) but I want to only spend about a week of development time getting it up to a nice useable level. The time will be spread over a few weeks or so though.

3. Learn, develop and master Merb

I’m looking at merb as another ruby based alternative to rails -which although very nice might be an overkill for certain things as it comes with a lot of stuff. Merb is different to rails though it takes more of the approach of adding what you need instead of having it all thrown in there. I ran some simple benchmarks the other day by writing the same app in rails and merb.

This app simply pulled some records out the same database, they both had the same layout and pretty much the same code and here are the results I got from running apache benchmark (ab) making 10000 requests with a concurency of 100.

Rails development mode: 22.98 req/sec
Merb development mode: 144.62
req/sec
Rails production mode: 151.18 req/sec
Merb production mode: 222.90 req/sec

req/sec = requests per second.

As you can see merb seemed quite a bit faster so looking forward to some development with merb.

3 goals will do for now, I’m sure I’ll have much more as I go though the development stage… so stay tuned join the beta and hopefully you’ll enjoy the service.