12 September 2005
Recent work
I reached a milestone of sorts with EventNet this past week. I have the filter for date ranges, relative dates, and keywords written. It's a little slow right now, possibly because some of the schedule logic is executed in code and not on the database side, but that's a point for refactoring later. I also have the basic views written--calendar, timeline, and list--with links to drill-down by week and day, and pagination of longer lists. Most of the read-only aspects of the site are written, with the most important part--user editing--yet to be done.
The past few days have been mostly finishing a couple of site aggregators. I had realized that, like RadioWave, an app on the server could populate the database by screen-scraping from the information that's already out there. Duh. It was oddly easy to write a bot to spider the information from a major-events-calendar-site-who-will-remain-nameless. Instant data, tagged and scheduled.
The primary issue has been the constantly nagging decision of how much work to offload to the database and how much to put in code. That's always an issue and resolved generally case-by-case. You want the code that represents database objects to be as generic and reusable as possible, but often need to write very specific queries to retrieve the data you need. And there's a balance between executing repeated queries but getting hit with extra memory allocation, and executing fewer queries but taking up extra CPU cycles in code. Ideally, the design should be such that you can easily make alterations in either direction. Ideally.
Anyway, production may slow considerably, what with the new job starting this Wednesday. A change, and a return to C++, will be good.
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