From my last post, I talked about how great Yeoman is. I have found one issue with Yeoman but there is a easy solution. Yeoman comes with its own built-in server which is very convenient, but if you’re working on a application which requires access to an API this becomes an issue due to cross site domain. For some time I’ve been making a symbolic link of my Yeoman app folder into my Tomcat’s webapp folder which would allow me to access the API running on the same server.

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.

Nothing too big but I did some small updates to two of my projects; amscotti.com and Nodejs map example. Node.js Geolocation Map Example This is a project that I did awhile ago when learning node.js. Because things are new in the node.js world, the libraries update often and the ones I used (Mostly Socket.io) did change and needed some updates to get it working again with the newer versions. I also wanted to move the hosting from dotCloud to Heroku, the new address is at http://nodejsmapexample.

One of the things I forgot to talk about in my “A look in to nodeJS” posting was what originally got me looking at nodejs. I had been seeing nodejs pop up here and there and I kind of wanted to learn more about it, but it wasn’t really on the top of my list. I always check www.thriftebook.com to see if there are any new deals for ebooks. Sometimes, O’Reilly has deals that you can get videos too.

NodeJS is a new take on a way to build scalable network services. Note that I didn’t say web applications as nodeJS can do far more then just web apps. I’ve heard of people making IRC chats servers and DNS servers. So the capabilities of nodeJS go beyond just making web apps, but for myself this is my primary interests in nodeJS, but more precisely being able to make real time web apps.

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.