On September 14, Altoros organized a Ruby on Rails meetup that took place in Minsk, Belarus (Eastern Europe). Attended by 80+ Ruby experts from the local dev community, the event featured several sessions on RoR, cloud, and other relevant topics.

During the meetup, the participants had an opportunity to test their programming skills in a contest of Codenjoy, an open source training gamification framework for developers.  For the event, our team created a Ruby connector to this service. Developers that took part in the contest could write bots that were playing Tetris, a popular PC game from the ’80s.

Watch the video to see how the bots competed against each other:

Ruby fluff talks, tea/coffee, and lots of informal networking—it was a nice, warm event. Check out the photos below.

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On September 13, Altoros exhibited at Couchbase [SF] 2013 held in San Francisco.

At the conference, our partner Couchbase announced Couchbase Lite, a lightweight version of their database for mobile devices (iOS and Android). Another notable disclosure was N1QL, a query language for Couchbase.

The next event on our schedule is Oracle OpenWorld 2013. We still have several tickets left to give away for free. Meet us at the conference on September 22-26!

Download the latest Couchbase benchmark: The 2014 Technical Comparison Report: Cassandra (DataStax), MongoDB, and Couchbase Server

BaRuCo 2013, a Barcelona Ruby Conference, will be held during September 14–15. The event will feature 17 sessions on the hottest topics of the Ruby ecosystem. They range from practical aspects (such as code refactoring, garbage collection, pattern design, etc.) to more philosophic discussions on “Building a culture of quality” and Ruby’s future. Read the agenda here.

Altoros contributes to the event as a sponsor along with such companies as Heroku, Basho, Engine Yard, Zendesk, GitHub, and many others. If you want to meet Robert Claeson, our Managing Director UK, face to face there, just let us know in the comments.

With over 100 services ready to deploy, Juju allows for building public/private environments and managing them with only a few commands. You can select a ready system component (called charm) from a special store and start combining the elements to create an environment that you need. However, what can be done if you need a solution that is not available in the store? The guys from Altoros created a Rack charm for Juju that simplifies installation of RoR and Sinatra applications to cloud platforms supported by Juju. In this blog post, I’ll give you a guide on how to deploy Discourse, a next-generation platform for community discussions, using Juju and the Rack charm. To get started, you will need a configured and successfully bootstrapped Juju environment. You can learn how to do it here. Read the full article on my GitHub page to find out how to add Discourse to your Juju admin console.

During the last two months, our team has been using AngularJS, a JavaScript UI framework, to develop a user interface for the next-generation document management system. We also utilized Grunt for building a client application and Karma for automating unit tests. The back-end part was developed with the Java technology stack.

If you’re a novice to AngularJS, you can start with this introduction article. Below I’ll provide a short overview of the main AngularJS features we tried and give you some tips on how to fix some issues.

Rapid development

With this tool, JavaScript development becomes really fast. A single person can bring out 1–2 significant features a day. Not less important, AngularJS is also good for prototyping. This framework makes it is possible to find the right balance between a code quality and velocity of the development process.

Extending HTML capabilities with Directives

AngularJS comes with a set of built-in directives that allow for creating custom HTML elements and modifying the behavior of DOM elements. It can be quite useful for building complex front ends. Isolated scopes enable developers to divide data and use a particular portion of this data when necessary. One of the main documentation drawbacks is that it provides just a few examples of how to work with directives and scopes. So, we had to use these components intuitively.

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Today’s Web applications deal with massive data sets that require high-performance systems for processing and analysis. However, information becomes even more valuable, if you can efficiently visualize it.

We have prepared a comparison of three wide-spread but very different JavaScript libraries to see how they cope with big data and real-time visualization. The libraries were selected based on popularity, performance, implementation approach, and relevance:

1)    Flot, an open source jQuery plug-in designed for drawing diagrams in Canvas
2)    Highcharts, one of the most popular proprietary libraries
3)    D3.js, a large open-source framework for data visualization

Below is a brief comparative table that will give you a general idea of what big data and real-time visualization capabilities you can expect from these three tools.

Download this document to get a more detailed comparison of Flot, Highcharts, and D3.js with 16 sample diagrams, a vendor-independent overview, as well as information on required code size, platform support, etc.

Based on complex mathematical algorithms, automated stock trading solutions take into account hundreds of factors and suggest the right time for placing buy/sell orders. Some of the systems like that can even make a deal without any human involvement. However, if an algorithm omits essential market parameters, this may bring significant loss.

In my guest post for Hortonworks, I shared a real-life example of how Hadoop and data clustering speeded up stock trading system’s performance by 20% and increased a customer’s revenues by 12%. You will learn how data clustering helped to diversify sell/buy strategies and how the right infrastructure improved the system’s performance without additional investments.

Here is another portion of fresh database news for July 2013. Read on to learn about the latest releases and get some tips that can save you hours of googling.

Highlights:

• LYNXeon 2.29 works 10x faster and stores 4x more data
• Bigdata releases a graph-mining library for GPUs and multiple-core CPUs
• A new benchmark for graph databases presented at the Systor 2013 conference
• Latest updates to BrightstarDB: improved performance and support for high-level APIs
• Neo4j 1.9.2 is already available
• The querying mechanism of Neo4j explained
• How to deploy ArangoDB on Uberscape and Raspberry PI

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Hadoop can be deployed in many different ways. Still, it is complicated to evaluate performance of your deployment without years of experience in configuring and tuning such systems. Andrei Yurkevich, CTO of Altoros, spoke at Cloud Expo in NY about the ways you can objectively measure Hadoop performance. The session revealed the results of benchmarking Apache Hadoop on Ubuntu, RedHat, and SmartOS hypervisors and provided recommendations on how to evaluate the performance of Hadoop clusters deployed in various environments.

Following our previous posts, we overviewed the latest performance results achieved by NoSQL/NewSQL vendors.

Highlights:

• MapR accelerates performance of HBase applications by 25x
• VoltDB 3.2: ~1 million transactions per sec with 3 nodes
• NuoDB’s scale-out performance
• TokuMX vs. MongoDB: up to 60x better insertion performance

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