Simon Willison’s Weblog

PostgreSQL 8.5 alpha 2 is out. “P.S. If you’re wondering about Hot Standby and Synchronous Replication, they’re still under heavy development and still (at this point) expected to be in 8.5.”—Hot Standby is PostgreSQL-speak for MySQL-style master/slave replication for scaling your reads.

# 9:02 am / databases, hotstandby, postgresql, replication, scaling

Underscore.js. A new library of functional programming primitives for JavaScript—each, map, all, any, inject, detect etc. Unlike some similar libraries this one doesn’t extend the built-in objects, instead opting to bind the new functions to the underscore symbol. A jQuery-style noConflict() option is available if even that is too much namespace pollution for you.

# 5:08 pm / documentcloud, functional, javascript, jquery, noconflict, underscore

JSLitmus. “A lightweight tool for creating ad-hoc JavaScript benchmark tests”. Includes an ingenious hack for graphing the results—it generates a Google Chart, then provides a TinyURL for viewing that chart in the future. The TinyURL is generated by pointing an inconspicuous iframe at the TinyURL API and letting the user copy-and-paste the resulting shortened URL directly out of the iframe.

# 5:11 pm / benchmarking, google-charts, iframes, javascript, jslitmus, tinyurl