At Hippo we recently started using Couchbase as the storage solution for our targeting/relevance module. Couchbase is a really high performant NoSQL database, which since version 2.0 can be used as a (JSON) document database. Couchbase is really fast when it comes to simple CRUD operations, but does lack some search capabilities like Geo-spatial search (still ‘experimental’ mode) and free text search, which you might find in other document oriented NoSQL databases like MongoDB.
At Hippo we have a concept we call ‘Hippo Fridays’. Hippo Fridays are monthly Fridays on which all Hippo developers can share knowledge, try out new things, work on improvements or hack on their own pet project. We’ve been having Hippo Fridays for more then a year and even if it’s only one day a month, they are always great fun!
Hippo CMS has a rapid growing community, so we want to see our community well organized and connected. With this post I would like to remind you about the available channels to communicate with each other (and the Hippo team) to get information, resolve problems and share experiences.
Last Friday I traveled to the wonderful city of Paris together with some Hippo colleagues for the dotJS conference. It was going to be my first tech conference in France and I was really excited. dotJS is a new conference and promoted itself as: “The largest JavaScript conference in France”, which raised my expectations. The list of speakers looked promising with for instance Jeremy Ashkenas (creator of Backbone.js) and Jacob Thornton (one of the creators of Twitters Bootstrap). It was a two day conference of which I only attended the first day (second day were workshops). The rest of this post will be about how I experienced the conference.
Besides my work at Hippo I’m quite a fan of Play framework. My first introduction to Play framework was back in 2011 just around the time I was about to attend Devoxx. Because of this I attended a talk at Devoxx by James Ward about Deploying Java & Play Framework Apps to the Cloud. I’ve been following James on Twitter since that day because he was playing around with quite some interesting technologies. Recently I noticed James introduced an interesting project called WebJars.