Atlassian just took their Bitbucket Pipelines out of Beta a bit ago, so I wanted to take look and get something up and running on it. From a quick look, it reminds me a lot of Codeship, which is a great service I have used to publish this blog along with using it at my previous job. For a nice test, I wanted to see if I could replace Codeship with Bitbucket Pipelines for my blog.

If you look around the news you will always hear about some big name that has been hacked and had their password database compromised. In recent news, this has happened to many people like these guys and them, but if you keep looking you’ll find tons more. The topic of security and how you are storing passwords always comes up, but this is not the point of this posting. I wanted to take this time to point out a Mozilla based project which helps in this area.

Keeping with learning more about Amazon Web Services, I wanted to build on the examples I did for SQS along with using Amazon Simple Email Service. The Simple Email Service is, as you could guess, for sending emails. It gives you sending features of a large Email Services Provider but with a low entry point. Just like lot of the other Amazon services, you pay for what you use without any contracts.

I’ve been really taking interest in the Amazon Web Services and trying to learn how to use them best I can. I really do find the Amazon Web Services a great set of tools that let you work with very scaleable services, but one thing you need to keep in mind is they are very “sticky”. What I mean by sticky is once you fully integrate your applications into using them you are most likely not going to be switching any time soon.

WebSockets are a hot topic now a days with the HTML5 push, even though they are not officially part of HTML5 spec. If WebSockets are new to you, they are a way of being able to keep a connection open from the client’s browser to the server. It will let you push data back and forth, think AJAX but without the need of pulling for new data over and over. WebSockets give you the ability to push, which gives you a very close to real time update on the client’s side.

If you have read some of my other postings you know by now that I enjoy using the data from World of Warcraft in my projects. In my mind it’s a good amount of data that I can easily understand having played World of Warcraft for many years now. If you look at the Blizzard Community Platform API Documentation you will see that there is an Auction Resource that will return a link to a JSON file you can download that will show you all the auctions for a given server.

If you have worked with Ruby on Rails Activerecord before you know how it makes working with databases very easy by giving you objects to deal with communication with the database. MongoMapper is an Object-Document-Mapper (ODM), it takes a lot of ideas from Activerecord and in turn should be very familiar. I found MongoMapper a good fit for people that want to use Sinatra ,because you are able to simply make your model classes right within the application file.

Loggly is a great cloud service for managing log files from servers or many servers. It’s also an add-on for your Heroku hosted app. Loggly comes in different tiers from a free to monthly service based on how much data you store on Loggly servers. Being cheap, I have picked the free tier for amscotti.com as it’s not a mission critical app and I don’t have tons of logs. One of the coolest things I like about Loggly is they do ‘Log Archiving’ on Amazon’s S3 for you.

To keep with the previous posting I made with MongoDB, I am going to show some Ruby code of how to connect and push data in to your database. If you take a look at the MongoDB driver page you see that there are a good number of programming languages that are supported by MongoDB.org along with tons that are supported by the community. My languages of choice is Ruby. It’s a Supported language from MongoDB.