I recently added a Solr-powered search feature to this site (using django-haystack). Rather than go to the trouble (and server resources drain) of deploying Solr via Tomcat, I decided instead to deploy it via Jetty. There's a wiki page with detailed instructions for deploying Solr with Jetty, and the wiki page also includes a link to the jetty.sh startup script.
The instructions seem simple enough. However, I ran into some serious problems when trying to get the startup script to work. The standard java -jar start.jar was working fine for me. But after following the instructions to the letter, and after double-checking everything, a call to:
sudo /etc/init.d/jetty start
still resulted in my getting the (incredibly unhelpful) error message:
Starting Jetty: FAILEDMy server is running Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04), and from my experience, the start-stop-daemon command in jetty.sh doesn't work on that platform. Let me know if you've experienced the same or similar issues on other *nix flavours or on other Ubuntu versions. Your mileage may vary.
For some time, I've been using the per-site cache feature that comes included with Django. This site's caching needs are very modest: small personal site, updated infrequently, with two simple blog-like sections and a handful of static pages. Plus, it runs fast enough even without any caching. A simple "brute force" solution like Django's per-site cache is more than adequate.
However, I grew tired of the fact that whenever I published new content, nothing was invalidated in the cache. I began to develop a routine of first writing and publishing the content in the Django admin, and then SSHing in to my box and restarting memcached. Not a good regime! But then again, I also couldn't bring myself to make the effort of writing custom invalidation routines for my cached pages. Considering my modest needs, it just wasn't worth it. What I needed was a solution that takes the same "brute force" page caching approach that Django's per-site cache already provided for me, but that also includes a similarly "brute force" approach to invalidation. Enter Jimmy Page.
Last weekend, I attended Social Innovation Camp Sydney 2010. SiCamp is an event where several teams have one weekend in which to take an idea for an online social innovation technology, and to make something of it. Ideally, the technology gets built and deployed by the end of the camp, but if a team doesn't reach that stage, simply developing the concept is an acceptable outcome as well.
I was part of a team of seven (including our team leader), and we were the team that built Refugee Buddy. As the site's slogan says: "Refugee Buddy is a way for you to welcome people to your community from other cultures and countries." It allows regular Australians to sign up and become volunteers to help out people in our community who are refugees from overseas. It then allows refugee welfare organisations (both governmnent and independent) to search the database of volunteers, and to match "buddies" with people in need.
Of the eight teams present at this OzSiCamp, we won! Big congratulations to everyone on the team: Oz, Alex, James, Daniela, Tom, (and Jeremy — that's me!) and most of all Joy, who came to the camp with a great concept, and who provided sound leadership to the rest of us. Personally, I really enjoyed working on Refugee Buddy, and I felt that the team had a great vibe and the perfect mix of skills.
It's recently become quite popular for web sites to abandon the tasks of user authentication and account management, and to instead shoulder off this burden to a third-party service. One of the big services available for this purpose is Facebook. You may have noticed "Sign in with Facebook" buttons appearing ever more frequently around the 'Web.
The common workflow for Facebook user integration is: user is redirected to the Facebook login page (or is shown this page in a popup); user enters credentials; user is asked to authorise the sharing of Facebook account data with the non-Facebook source; a local account is automatically created for the user on the non-Facebook site; user is redirected to, and is automatically logged in to, the non-Facebook site. Also quite common is for the user's Facebook profile picture to be queried, and to be shown as the user's avatar on the non-Facebook site.
This article demonstrates how to achieve this common workflow in Django, with some added sugary sweetness: maintaning a whitelist of Facebook user IDs in your local database, and only authenticating and auto-registering users who exist on this whitelist.