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.

I’m a big fan of CouchDB. I enjoy how they go about doing things and how you are able to use it without the need of drivers as its all RESTful based. As long as your language of choice has the ability to make RESTful calls and read JSON data then you’re all set. But before I really started to use CouchDB I did start looking at MongoDB, another Document data store.

This has been a posting that I been putting off for some time now. noSQL is a great topic but the more you look in to it the more there is. noSQL covers a lot of technologies and ideas, some very new, and some that been around for a bit. I’m hoping this posting wets your appetite for knowing more about noSQL. One thing I will say to start off with, noSQL is a buzzword, plain and simple.

Haven’t blogged in some time so I wanted to give a quick update on the things I’m looking at for myself and work. Right now my group is coming to the end of a big project at work so a lot of my time has been going into that, but I’ve still been looking at some new things that I hope to later write postings about. Right now the first item on the top of my list is NodeJS, node is a way to build scaleable web applications by using just JavaScript.