You might want to use SimpleDB for storage and to support text indexing and search if you did not want to manually run and administer Solr yourself. Here is a little snippet that shows how to store searchable documents in SimpleDB: require 'rubygems' require 'aws_sdb' SERVICE = AwsSdb::Service.new # assuming that this domain is already created DOMAIN = "some_test_domain_7854854" class Document def initialize name, text words = (name + ' ' + text).downcase.split.uniq attributes = {:words => words, :text => text} SERVICE.put_attributes(DOMAIN, name, attributes) end def Document.search query # The last inject takes the intersection and # insures that all search terms are present: keys = query.downcase.split.collect {|x| SERVICE.query(DOMAIN, "['words' starts-with '#{x}']")[0] }.inject {|x, y| x & y } keys.collect {|key| SERVICE.get_...

Although I use Ruby (mostly Rails) and Common Lisp on many customer projects, I am heavily invested in the Java platform and I don't see that changing in the next ten years or so. Java is more than a little heavy on ceremony however, and I would like a really agile language for the JVM. I have used Clojure a lot in the last year for work on one customer's project but at least for now the lack of concise and useful runtime error backtraces kills some of the joy of using Clojure. Really nice language and community however, and I expect in a few years Clojure may be my primary JVM language. I love coding in Ruby and the JRuby developers do a great job moving the sub-platform forward. However, except for large Rails applications, I don't see myself writing very large applications in Ruby: for me Ruby is a scripting language for getting stuff done quickly and easily. I do like Scala but the learning curve is steep and that means that it is difficult to find pre-trained highly ...

I am on vacation so I have not had much chance to try the beta invites I just received for cloudfoundry.com and dotcloud.com but both look promising as works in progress. For now, Cloud Foundry is set up for Ruby Rack applications (like Rails and Sinatra) and Java Spring apps. They currently support MongoDB, MySQL and Redis. They will release the core software if you want to run a cloud on your own servers. Dotcloud supports a wide range of platforms and data stores. Their roadmap shows what is available right now and what is planned. Both beta programs are free for now. It will be interesting to see what the costs are.

Both the Play! and Rails frameworks implement MVC and have very agile development environments. Play!, being written in Java (but also supporting Scala development) accomplishes this agility by using the Eclipse incremental Java compiler so if you edit any Java code or HTML template files (with embedded Java/Groovy expressions) you immediately see the results after refreshing your web browser. While Play! is not nearly as complete of a stack as Rails, it does include modules for MongoDB AppEngine Objectify GWT Search PDF generation of any view Scala use CoffeeScript OpenAuth working with Google, Yahoo, Twitter, etc. Simple CRUD scaffolding Facebook Connect and Graph API Lucene search of JPA models etc. I have several years of Rails experience and I am using Java EE 6 for a customer project. With this background, I put Play! in the sweet spot between Java EE 6 and Rails: easy to learn if you know Java and supports agile development. My favorite part of Java EE 6 is JPA,...

I just purchased an MP3 album "Johnny Winter And / Live" for $5 and got a $20 one year upgrade of 20 GB of cloud storage - a sweet deal, but considering that you always get 5 GB free this may not be much of an added value. Amazon has a nifty uploader application that looked at my iTunes MP3s and playlists and is cloning that on Amazon Cloud Player automatically. My entire iTunes library will only take up a few GBs after it is automatically uploaded. Sometimes Amazon kills Apple's iTunes store on price: I was about to buy a few tracks on iTunes last year and then realized I could buy the entire album as MP3 on Amazon for for not much more. Amazon seems to be investing in introductory offers like the upgrade for Cloud Player and the first time AWS developer's package (basically free to develop and deploy for one year). Certainly expensive for them to provide as free services but Amazon is playing the long game. My ordered list of the most impressive technology compani...