[gambit-list] AWS, Termite, and Snow

Joe Hosteny jhosteny at gmail.com
Wed Jan 30 10:31:16 EST 2008


On Jan 30, 2008, at 9:56 AM, Guillaume Germain wrote:

> On Jan 29, 2008 11:29 PM, Joe Hosteny <jhosteny at 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 list
> discussions, 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

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