Shahzad Bhatti Welcome to my ramblings and rants!

September 16, 2010

My impression of Diaspora codebase

Filed under: Computing — admin @ 5:07 pm

I briefly reviewed the Diaspora source code, which is all written in Ruby on Rails 3.0. Here are my initial thoughts on the codebase:

What I liked:

  • It’s all open source — YES!
  • Diaspora uses latest Rails 3.0 APIs such as global respond_to in controllers, thin controllers, and fat models with new query APIs. The code uses RSpec for tests and Factory-Girl for creating test objects instead of fixtures, which are much easily managed. There are a few Selenium tests, but most of the tests are in RSpec.
  • Diaspora is built using latest technologies and standards such as PKI (OpenSSL), HTML5, VCard, Websockets, Microformat, XRDS, PubSubHubbub along with popular libraries such as EventMachine, HAML, jQuery, Fancybox, Sprinkle, Bundler, Blueprint, etc.
  • Deployment scripts and documentation – Though, there isn’t any documentation on overall architecture or comments in the code, but I found installation documentation very helpful. Also, the deployment rake tasks and configurations are all included in the source code.

What I disliked:

Though, I found the code to be fairly easy to read and consistent in style I found following problems related to the performance, scalability and modularity.

  • Service API – Diaspora uses Rails controller for serving HTML as well as JSON, XML and XRDS requests but I would have preferred separate services for the API with much more defined contract.
  • Pagination – I found sporadic use of pagination in the code but a number of classes use Rails’ builtin relationships without any pagination. It’s like when you ask for banana you get the gorilla holding the banana. In my experience, this has been problem with all O/R mapping tools, which give you nice syntax for fetching related objects until your server runs out of memory or your database dies on you.
  • Before/after filters – I found a number of such filters in the code, which I have found to be another common issue with the scalability when before/after filters require a lot of overhead.
  • Asynchronous Messaging – I didn’t see any use of asynchronous messaging as a lot of requests such as adding/removing a friend can be done asynchronous.
  • Modularity – Diaspora code uses modules and models for the business logic, but I found a couple of models such as user to be too big, which can be divided into suitable modules.
  • MongoDB – I have nothing against MongoDB but I found a lot of code depends on MongoDB. I would have preferred using data access service instead, which completely encapsulates underlying storage technology and allows you to replace it without modifying all the code.

Conclusion

Despite the Knuth’s advice: “Forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil,” you need the architecture for scalability and performance when you are building the platform to replace Facebook. As social networking tools depend much more on Network effects or Metcalfe’s law instead of best technology, I hope early release of the software allows it to capture more users who use it. I was somewhat disappointed that identi.ca has not caught much attraction as open source alternative to Twitter. And I hope that Diaspora succeeds in becoming a good alternative to Facebook.

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