Mike Malone talks with Leah Culver of Pownce
Mike Malone talks with Leah Culver of Pownce.
[tease] (lightly condensed)
Pownce is built on a variation of the LAMP stack: Debian Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Python. But the site uses a number of less mainstream technologies to speed up development, improve performance, and reduce costs.
Django is “a high-level Python Web framework that encourage rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.” In other words, it helps you build high-performance, well designed Web applications quickly. The framework consists of:
* An object-relational mapper
* Template and cache systems
* An automatically generated admin interface
* An elegant regular expression based URL dispatcher
* Full support for multiple-language applications and internationalizationPerlbal is a Perl-based reverse proxy load balancer and web server. It’s used by large websites like LiveJournal and TypePad to distribute traffic across a number of backend servers. Pownce is currently distributed across about five servers, but Culver says “that’s likely to change at any time.”
Amazon S3 provides “a simple web service interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.” The minimalist interface allows developers to write, read, and delete objects containing from 1 byte to 5 gigabytes of data each. You pay only for what you use, and there is no minimum fee.
Pownce uses the [S3] service to host file uploads, up to 10MB for normal users and 100MB for pro accounts. Culver says, “we were pleasantly surprised with how inexpensive Amazon S3 has been and it’s been working really well for us so far.”
Check out Vino2Vino, a web site Malone is working on with his brother. Clever stuff.