Strand3: Greg Hewett

In the recent application that I am building, I am trying to increasingly cache content, so that the site can support more users and have a faster response time. I am pretty impressed with how easy it is to cache using the built in ruby on rails helpers. Integrating ruby with memcache is a different story. I like it, but it the client does not seem to be as fail proof as I would hope. Anyways, there is an interesting problem that is created when caching content. The content that is cached cannot be personalized if you really want to see some performance benefit. In other words, why would you want to have a cached version for every user personalized for them?

I have had always thought that it was ok to wait until the end of a project to implement your cacheing, but I found that you need to keep in in the back of your mind the whole time. We are going to have to write some front end code to recreate the personalized aspects of the site. I wish that we would have just done that from the start.

Has anyone else have any cacheing design ideas or gotchas?

Over the last few weeks, I have been really interested in making games for the web. My wife, Jennifer, really wanted a sliding tile game, and since Andy and Geoff were also working on games, I thought it might be fun.

The game is not iPhone ready, so you will have to play it with your normal web browser for now. Please enjoy, and let me know what you think.

Sliding Tile Puzzle