IFBIN 2.0 Development

DIGG IT!     Published Tuesday, December 26, 2006 at 1:48 PM .

I am working on IFBIN 2.0 all week. It has been 1 year since I worked on IFBIN and it has been far too long. I am going to be blogging my development of IFBIN 2.0 and launching the new version of the service with the Apollo Public Beta in 2007.

IFBIN 2.0 is a client/server application that leverages the internet for data exchange over port 80 HTTP/HTTPS. The desktop IFBIN client allows an end user to find/download/upload software examples from the IFBIN repository. The server side is an API that is accessed by the Apollo client. With the exception of the IFBIN file format, all data is stored and transmitted uses XML. The IFBIN file format contains meta-data about a file system and the data within the file system itself. Having 1:1 files per examples on the server side makes file management much easier, especially given the files named with the SHA1 key of the file data. This allows for some great server automation in dealing with files as file naming can be dynamically applied to the uploaded files.

IFBIN Server Stack:
- THTTPD (static binary data over http)
- TurboGears 1.0 (CherryPy, SQLObject, Kid)
- Python 2.4.4
- MYSQL
- FreeBSD 6.1 Minimal/Optimized

IFBIN Client Stack:
- Flex 2.0.1
- MXML & ActionScript 3
- Apollo Runtime

The server will use THTTPD, TurboGears, Python 2.4.4 running on FreeBSD 6.1. The goal is for the server to be very scalable while supporting rapid development. In this case, Python is ideal on FreeBSD 6.1 within a TurboGears instance. The IFBIN 1.0 client and server used Python and leveraging this on the server is ideal.

The existing IFBIN Server is actually 100% static and is generated onPublish via a Python API. Using URLReWriting on Apache the Flex 1.5 UI loads data remotely to present the UI Data. This model worked very well as a full republish took 2sec writing some 1200 files to the file system. The server will have as few dynamic URLs as possible by by majority most content will be statically cached.

The dynamic APIs will be:

- User.Register()
- User.Login()
- User.Reset()
- User.Profile()
- Example.Search()
- Example.Upload()
- Example.Rate()
- And some surprises... :)

These areas will all be written using TurboGears and Python. I believe that this will allow for very rapid development of the backend for IFBIN 2.0 as the backend is simply an API. Flex will provide the complete UI within the Apollo application.

Building IFBIN last time was a blast and I expect to learn a ton. I have put a lot of thought into IFBIN 2.0 and I look forward to its release in 2007.

More to come!

Ted ;)

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