Skip to main content

SarathOnline Version History

[Page always Updated, Last: May 2010]

Sep 2010 v6.1 - Site running on a custom simple MVC framework is now live. Also includes Dynamic Resources - images and jscss files. These are now served from BigTable datastore.

Apr 2010 v6 (small v) - Back down to Plain old java. Wrote own non-reflective Java mvc framework to mimic spring mvc. Objectify for Data access. Released in May. released only as beta.

2009 - 2010 V5 discontinued attempt - Spring. App engine cold start up times better, 12 sec - but still a worry. Best optimized configuration, with minimal libraries still around 8 secs.

Aug 2009 V4 discontinued attempt - Grails. Tried in vain. App engine cold start up times as much as 30 sec (really awful). Fall back to python v3.1. Trying Spring 2.5.2. Plans to upgrade to 3.

2009 V3.1 Began the year with Ajax (Google API) blog. Quickly followed by Django. A big reason was there was an application at work using grails. Cought up grails, rails, and django frameworks. So this minor release is to that new framework.

2008 V3. moved to Python! Google announced App Engine framework. Although a little skeptical at first, I wanted to move into the *cloud*. Some where in the summer, I slowly migrated to V3 dumping the 4 yr php site. Also came a new look. Made my blogger blog as the primary CMS. Looking back it is worth it! But with past experiences, I realised, I could keep the whole source code. (I dont seem to find my perl site code anywhere :( )

2007-08 - V2 improved. Took domain name over to godaddy for better control on dns. configured Google Apps with SarathOnline.com for Google powered email. Some website features were crazy sending sms to india and receiving. Notes-On-Web (decommissioned now) - a prototype ajax postit emulation with drag drop and position saving etc.

2005-06 - I hosted a sub-domain on a home web server (To host and learn JEE). For a long time, This was proving to extremely difficult, unstable and unreliable. By this time, I was getting more professional about my site. What started as fun, became my web identity. So I used the site for implementing upcoming technologies, ajax, Google Custom Search (static one at that time), Custom email. Etc.

2004- I was doing quite some java now. But webhosts (atleast in india) were not providing java or tomcat as mainstream solutions. LAMP was big at that time. So I learnt PHP. Bought my first domain SarathOnline.com in July 2004. Wrote all those cute little applications (guest book, photo gallery) all myself. I called this site SarathOnline.com v2. Moved to US on work, so more exposure to technologies now..

2002-03 I worked extensively on perl site. I was working at Dell. Met with techniqually quipped collegues Shashidhar, Arun - who took my interest to ASP. After a valient attempt in getting stuck with VB ASP and ASP.Net, I found my calling in JAVA!! And then I never looked back.

2001-02 Then it was my internship at Rendezvous-on-Chip, network system ware company in india. I had to work on CGI in C, C++! Learnt hands on Linux and fell in love with it. Shell Scripting and PERL opened up new ideas on my site. I landed on netfirms. Created sarath.netfirms.com (which was ad free at that time). Which had support for SSI, PERL and cgi-bin (omg so much nostalgia!!). May be this would be called SarathOnline 1.0

2000-01 / My first ever site was in Geocities. I believe it was in my 3yr of Engg. It was my sandbox for learning HTML, javascript - Which was fashionably called DHTML at that time.

Popular posts from this blog

Powered By

As it goes, We ought to give thanks to people who power us. This page will be updated, like the version page , to show all the tools, and people this site is Powered By! Ubuntu GIMP Firebug Blogger Google [AppEngine, Ajax and other Apis] AddtoAny Project Fondue jQuery

Decorator for Memcache Get/Set in python

I have suggested some time back that you could modularize and stitch together fragments of js and css to spit out in one HTTP connection. That makes the page load faster. I also indicated that there ways to tune them by adding cache-control headers. On the server-side however, you could have a memcache layer on the stitching operation. This saves a lot of Resources (CPU) on your server. I will demonstrate this using a python script I use currently on my site to generate the combined js and css fragments. So My stitching method is like this @memize(region="jscss") def joinAndPut(files, ext): res = files.split("/") o = StringIO.StringIO() for f in res: writeFileTo(o, ext + "/" + f + "." + ext) #writes file out ret = o.getvalue() o.close() return ret; The method joinAndPut is * decorated * by memize. What this means is, all calls to joinAndPut are now wrapped (at runtime) with the logic in memize. All you wa...

Faster webpages with fewer CSS and JS

Its easy, have lesser images, css and js files. I will cover reducing number of images in another post. But If you are like me, You always write js and css in a modular fashion. Grouping functions and classes into smaller files (and Following the DRY rule, Strictly!). But what happens is, when you start writing a page to have these css and js files, you are putting them in muliple link rel=style-sheet or script tags. Your server is being hit by (same) number of HTTP Requests for each page call. At this point, its not the size of files but the number server roundtrips on a page that slows your page down. Yslow shows how many server roundtrips happen for css and js. If you have more than one css call and one js call, You are not using your server well. How do you achieve this? By concatinating them and spitting out the content as one stream. So Lets say I have util.js, blog.js and so.js. If I have a blog template that depends on these three, I would call them in three script tags. Wh...