Recently we were looking for ways to do rapid building of prototype pages during our UI development. I still remember my first web project when I built an air ticket reservation system over a decade ago. Back then, we were concatenating HTML / Javascript inside servlet code to crank out the UI. The joy of building a cool new system was quickly offset by the frustration in dealing with escape / unescape single double quotes for multiple layers of Javascript inside Java code. Over these years, things evolved a lot in trying to address this separation of logic and presentation issue. We had JSP, Strut, Velocity, FreeMarker etc. They were running toward that goal with one getting closer than the other. But logic code still mingles with HTML/CSS . If not used cautiously, they can still yield spaghetti code faster than developers can chew.
Archive for March 2010
Network forensics in IRB: xtractr Ruby gem
What started off as a way to fully unit test xtractr, turned out to be a Gem, literally. First xtractr, then nuggets and now a gem. You follow? Seriously though, we are happy to announce a Ruby gem for xtractr which takes all the goodness of Ruby and interacts RESTfully with xtractr for oh-so-fun packet mining and troubleshooting all from within IRB.
Using Map/Reduce for Network Forensics and Troubleshooting
We launched xtractr earlier this week for network forensics, troubleshooting and handling support escalations involving large packet captures. Just so you know xtractr is a 4-tier app (more on that below) that combines the best of Web 2.0 with looking at packets in new light. Looking beyond the “unleash the power of packets” message, I wanted to write about what’s under the hood a little bit and how we are using CouchDB-style of Map/Reduce for uncovering all sorts of information inside large packet captures.
