Building on top of APIs and the Cloud - Pleasant Surprises
ExtensionFM is built on top of lots of other companies’ technologies. One big drawback of building on top of other companies’ technologies is that you are tied to their schedules and their priorities. That is a big drawback. But sometimes, there are pleasant surprises. In the past week, three main companies that ExtensionFM relies on fixed something or introduced something new that has enhanced ExtensionFM greatly.
Tumblr kicked off the week by introducing their Dashboard API. This API allows ExtensionFM to access the last 50 songs of a user’s dashboard. Before this, ExtensionFM was scraping the dashboard page which yielded the last few songs at best. The Dashboard API brought a major improvement to ExtensionFM. Thanks Tumblr!
Earlier today, Google released a new dev-channel version of Chrome which fixed a bug in Chrome’s HTML5 audio player. Some songs would have a horrible screech at the beginning. Now they no longer do. Thanks Google!
Later in the day, Amazon released two major improvements to SimpleDB, the cloud database that ExtensionFM uses. The first offers consistent reads. SimpleDB is great but the biggest knock on it has always been that it uses something called eventual consistency. That means that when you write data to it, it may take some time (5-60 seconds) for the data to propagate out to all their cloud servers. So if you wrote data and then read it right back (a common thing with databases) you may not get the latest data. I’ve learned to engineer around this, but now that they ‘fixed’ it, it opens up a ton of possibilities. The second improvement allows you to write data only when certain conditions exist in the database. Prior to this, you would need to read the data into your application, determine if you should write some data based on a condition and then write it. You could see how that combined with the previous eventual consistency problem could potentially be a very large headache. Well not anymore. Thanks Amazon!
It’s always a great day when things you would like to see done by other companies gets done. It’s a downright beautiful week when this happens three times.
