Killer Java applications server with nginx and memcached

Last days I worked setting up a new web serving structure for Wine, the largest wine’s e-commerce in Latin America. After testing, studying and learning a lot, we built a nice solution based on nginx and memcached. I will use a picture to describe the architecture:

As you can see, when a client do a request to the nginx server, it first checks on memcached if the response is already cached. If the response was not found on cache server, then nginx forward the request to Tomcat, which process the request, cache the response on memcached and returns it to nginx. Tomcat works only for the first client, and all other clients requesting the same resource will get the cached response on RAM. My objective with this post is to show how we built this architecture.

Flying with tipfy on Google App Engine

Hooray, there is a bonus part in the series (after a looooooooooooong wait)! In the first blog post, about Django, I received a comment about the use of tipfy, a small Python web framework made specifically for Google App Engine. Like Flask, tipfy is not a full stack framework and we will not use a database abstraction layer, we will use just the Google App Engine Datastore API, but tipfy was designed for Google App Engine, so it is less laborious to work with tipfy on App Engine.

Flying with Flask on Google App Engine

A little late, finally I introduce the third part of using Python frameworks in Google App Engine. I wrote before about web2py and Django, and now is the time of Flask, a Python microframework based on Werkzeug, Jinja2 and good intentions. Unlike Django and web2py, Flask is not a full stack framework, it has not a database abstraction layer or an object relational mapper, Flask is totally decoupled from model layer. It is really good, because we can use the power of SQLAlchemy when we are working with relational databases, and when work with non-relational databases, we can use the native API.

Flying with web2py on Google App Engine

Here is the second part of the series about Python frameworks under Google App Engine. Now we will talk about web2py, a simple and fast Python web framework. Like Django, web2py has a great data abstraction layer. Unlike Django, the web2py data abstraction layer (DAL) was designed to manage non-relational databases, including BigTable.

Flying with Django on Google App Engine

Google App Engine is a powerful tool for web developers. I am sure that it is useful and every developer should taste it =) Python was the first programming language supported by App Engine, and is a programming language with a lot of web frameworks. So, you can use some of these frameworks on Google App Engine. In a series of three blog posts, I will show how to use three Python web frameworks on App Engine: Django, Flask and web2py (not necessarily in this order).