Really Simple Monitoring

Moving toward cloud computing relieves from (most) hardware downtime worries, yet, cloud computing is no magic pill that garanties that every single of our apps is ready to serve users as expected.

You need a monitoring system to achieve this. In particular, OS uptime and simple HTTP responsiveness is only scratching the surface as far monitoring is concerned.

In order to go beyond plain uptime monitoring, Lokad has started a new Windows Azure open source project named Lokad.Monitoring. The project comes with several tenants:

• A monitoring philosophy,
• A XML format, the Really Simply Monitoring (shamelessly inspired by RSS),
• A web client for Windows Azure

Beta is version is already in production. Check project introduction page.

Lokad.Cloud - alpha version released

One of the major little-known weakness of cloud computing is development productivity. Indeed, developing over the cloud ain't easy, and as complexity goes, the management of a complex, fully-distributed app may become a nightmare. At Lokad, as we started migrating a fairly complex technology, we did get the feeling that we were needing strong patterns and practices - tailored for the cloud - so that we don't get lost half-way in the migration process.

That's how Lokad.Cloud was born.

In short, Lokad.Cloud is a framework that can be used to rationalize and speed-up development of back-end apps over Windows Azure. Read more on the announcement made directly on the Windows Azure Forums.

Migrating from OnTime to Trac, a short review

I have been a long time user of the project tracker OnTime provided by Axosoft. Yet, at Lokad, we have just migrated to Trac, a open source project tracker.

Although OnTime is a good product, there are quite a few elements definitively in favor a Trac

• low ceremony: Trac has no advanced workflow, no 10 fields bug entry forms, no team reporting dashboard - but it just works. When it comes to web app, less is more. If you can pinpoint a bug in one sentence, then filling a 6 steps bug replication form is just a waste of time.


• pretty URLs: that one is very often neglected by ASP.NET developers. It's really nice to be able to copy a URL such as http://foo.com/trac/ticket/17 into a mail, a wiki or even to bookmark it. Then, every single view in Trac has its own URL ready to be shared. In this respect, I have felt that the AJAX upgrade of OnTime, one year ago, was a downgrade from the usability viewpoint, because with AJAX, you loose both URLs and the ability to hit "back" on your web browser.


• emphasing usability and not coolness: when I select an item on Trac, I get the complete view of the item in a simple webpage. Agreed, the page design not super elegant, but since scrolling up and down is a mechanical feature of my mouse, and it happens to be really efficient - especially compared to the tiny AJAX tabs of OnTime.


• SVN integration: Trac let you browse the SVN source and associate SVN commits can be associated to Trac tickets. That one feature is a killer.

Disclaimer: OnTime is probably meant to be used through the Visual Studio add-in, yet, for some reason, I never managed to convince myself of actually installing the add-in, and I did stick to the hosted edition of OnTime. Thus, the comparison might be entirely fair.

More ScrewTurn tips (feed2js plugin)

ScrewTurn is used as a CMS for Lokad.com. Along with the main website www.lokad.com, we have also blog.lokad.com and forums.lokad.com that both provide RSS feeds. For a long time, I have been looking for a simple way to include RSS snippets directly in the web pages without any satisfying solution. You can have a look at the right sidebar of Lokad Products page to see what I mean by "Feed Snippet".

Feed2js for RSS snippet inclusion

For one month, I have been using Feed2js.org that provide a javascript based solution to include RSS snippets in your webpages. The Feed2js approach has one single major advantage: simplicity. Just cut-and-paste a sample javascript that call Feed2js.org and you're done. Unfortunately, this approach has two major drawbacks. First, it's roughly double the latency to complete the webpage retrieval. With Lokad.com, the overhead delay was sufficient to be noticed even when a DSL connection. Second, it potentially expose your website to cross-scripting attack (I am only saying potentially because Feed2js.org has proved to be very reliable in my experience).

Feed Snippet Plugin for ScrewTurn

For those reasons, I have settled myself for an improved (yet home-made) solution for ScrewTurn: a custom RSS feed snippet plugin. This piece of code relies on the ScrewTurn plugin framework. It retrieve the RSS feed on the server side and then use the ASP.Net caching mechanism to keep a copy for 1h before re-downloading the RSS feed. With this plugin, you can include a RSS feed snippet in your ScrewTurn page with a single line:

<feed itemCount="4" dateFormat="yyyy-MMM-dd">http://myfeedurl</feed>

The attribute itemCount indicates the maximal number of RSS items to be displayed in the web page. The attribute dateFormat corresponds to the .NET DateTime formatting option to be used to display the post publication date.

Download: FeedSnippetPlugin.cs.zip

Iridium r8 released and new website fo Math.NET

Math.NET is open-source project delivering mathematics / statistics libraries written in C# (and mostly targeting .Net, although Mono compatibility should not be an issue). I have been personally contributing on the numerics package of Math.NET code-named Iridium.

Several years ago, I did setup a mediawiki-based website for Math.NET, but it's now completely obsolete. Yet, I would like to mention Christoph Ruegg has released a brand new website for Math.NET. Update your (social) bookmarks with http://mathnet.opensourcedotnet.info/

Check also 8th release (March 2007) of the Iridium package available in the download section.