What's this ? read this post.

What happened

I took a bit of vacation and came back last week. I took a lot of pictures and I love this one taken at the Amneville Zoo near Metz. I was quite amazed by the quality of this Zoo by the way.

Share Server (F1)

We're continuing our work to get the F1 server ready, and Rob Miller, who joined last month (yay!) is helping me in this task. We're working on:
- removing the Pylons layer and using our own WSGI micro-framework like in other Services Apps -- since the F1 server is just a small oauth proxy, that should depend on nothing else than the library for every service (GMail, Twitter, etc.) - setting up the Services Status DB. This is explained here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/F1/Server/ServicesStatusDB. Basically this will let us turn on and off the proxy for a given service - continuing the Grand Split. The static web pages are now living on their own.

The Services Status DB involved some research/brainstroming with Shane, on the best way to do it, and we decided we would:

1/ Use Membase to store the status of every service. Membase provides vbuckets and has a really nice web managment interface to add/remove/modify the cluster. Pylibmc and libmemcached do not understand vbuckets yet, but I am working on it.

2/ Reject calls at the Nginx level when the service is down. I first wrote a NGinx module in C but we will not use it. The problem with NGinx modules is that everytime you change them you need to recompile and redeploy Nginx. Meh. Instead, as I was suggested in the Nginx mailing list, we're adding the Lua module in Nginx, that will allow us to script the behavior we want from within the Nginx config files.

Documentation

Hey check this out : http://docs.services.mozilla.com.

This is the sweet documentation center I've set up for Mozilla Services. I have started to add more content about each one of our Service, basically extracting what we have here and there in our wiki. I am trying to follow a similar pattern for each one of them.

While wikis are awesome to work collectively on specs, I love Sphinx because it makes it so easy to consolidate documentation for a project, and share a glossary, terms, definitions etc. And the documentation is treated like code, all in an Hg repository here: https://hg.mozilla.org/services/docs/

There's a lot of content to gather from various places in the wiki(s) in order to build a complete list of our services, but the idea is to add documentation there once the API has stabilized.

What's planned

More Share Server work. I will also try to push on more docs.

Also there's a new side project I've started that might be interesting to share here, I will try to blog later in the week about it. In a few words: it's a tool that should help MoPy people to share knowledge and try to maximize cross-team reuse of code when possible.