On Jan 30, 2008, at 9:56 AM, Guillaume Germain wrote:
On Jan 29, 2008 11:29 PM, Joe Hosteny jhosteny@gmail.com wrote: I recently wrote a library to manage a cluster of machines in Amazon's EC2. I'm looking to totally rewrite it, and port it to Scheme in the process. I was also looking at having some facility for managing the cluster from within, with event monitoring via SQS or Termite. Currently, the library does that via polling from a machine external to the cluster. It's not ideal, but was sufficient to get my application working.
That's extremely interesting. I was thinking of building a bunch of interfaces for various Amazon Web Services. What has been keeping me from doing it was having to write the HTTP stuff. It would be very nice to have an HTTP client library for Gambit.
Marc pointed me to some URI parsing code in the Gambit distribution. I took a quick look at that, and it may be sufficient. I'll know more later. If it is, I'll look into partitioning it into a Snow package as well.
Second question - if one doesn't exist, what do people do for regular expression parsing in Gambit?
I've used pregexp in the past. It was a bit slow, but it works pretty well: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dorai/pregexp/pregexp.html
It looks like I may not need this if the aforementioned code works. But this is good to know anyway.
So, a few general questions follow. From recent mailing listdiscussions, it sounds like Termite will be targeted towards Gambit only, for the time being at least. Guillaume, is that correct? If not, do you have an idea of when it might be seen on other Schemes (specifically, Chicken or PLT)?
Yes, that's correct. I don't plan on porting Termite to other Scheme implementations. That being said, I've recently refactored Termite so that it is packaged as a Gambit library instead of being compiled with Gambit. That extra "modularity" might make it easier to work with other implementations. But personally, I don't plan to spend much time on that.
Understood, and Gambit is certainly fine by me. My only concern was getting suitable libraries to make it all work.
As an aside, what features were you looking at adding in the near term? I think you briefly mentioned that you had some in mind the last time Termite came up.
Please keep us posted if you get something working. I'm very interested in that stuff.
I will. I've used both EC2 and S3 a fair amount, and they're both quite interesting. I think I will be targeting EC2 first, since it is easier to produce an API for that. I like the idea of extending the load balancer example in the Termite paper to kick off VMs and migrate processes to the new instances (as well as perform live cluster-wide code upgrades). I'm looking at both of these for a personal project.
I'll update the list as I go, but I may also mention progress on a personal blog (address below). It's a bit slow, but I'm too lazy to use more than one blog setup right now!
Cheers,
--Joe
www.maraudingrobots.com
Guillaume