SwitchPipe: Easier Web App Deployment (And Observations)
In January I was primarily working on a new technology called “SwitchPipe.” It took three weeks from start to completion and was inspired by a popular discussion I fielded on Ruby Inside regarding the difficulties involved in deploying Ruby and Rails Web applications.
The concept I imagined at the start of January was that a proxy could, in theory, do process management on backend applications, then forward HTTP requests to them. I got to work and, luckily, it worked. Writing network applications in Ruby isn’t the most efficient thing to do, but it’s quick to get something up and running, and even if I can only serve 500 requests a second through SwitchPipe, I’d still be serving 0 requests per second if I had to write it in C, because it wouldn’t be finished yet!
I’m not going to elaborate on SwitchPipe itself any more here, because I’ve already covered it at Ruby Inside and on its official site. In short, it’s a new technology, it’s a proof of concept, but it’s working well for me and a few other people, and that’s all I wanted to achieve.
Promoting SwitchPipe
Promoting SwitchPipe was very simple. I mentioned it on Twitter and posted about it on Ruby Inside. That’s basically all I did, and the social bookmarking effect took hold from there.
In its first full day online, the official site had approximately 3700 visitors, with about 650 on day two, 700 on day three, before settling down to only low “hundreds” per day after that. It beat my all time low record for Internet Explorer users.. just 8.25% of visitors. We’re getting somewhere! The biggest referrer was del.icio.us (SwitchPipe hit #3 on del.icio.us/popular in its first day) with 1034 visitors, Ruby Inside came second with 953, with Google and PopURLs trailing behind.
One thing that particularly impresses me is how there were only about 30 results in Google at the start of February, but now there are 4,580 results! This is impressive as a mere statistic, but it demonstrates just how dirty Google is becoming. The results on the first page are promising, but beyond that it’s nearly all Twitter, Jaiku and del.icio.us blog sidebar references. There’s a whole ton of meta information on the Web, and it’s heavily inflating the presumed size of the Web. There’s a lot of automation, a lot of repetition, and, let’s face it, a lot of junk. Having all of these backlinks is a good thing for the project, but a good thing for Google’s quality overall? I’m not so sure.
As promised in a previous post, SwitchPipe has been released to the public domain. Unless I seriously expect to make money from something, I couldn’t care less about precious copyrights and ownership. So, companies, feel free to steal SwitchPipe and put it in your products, gratis. Just don’t pretend you invented it from scratch, because that would be lying.
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