more about ali asaria
Alex writes about a story of a happy Well.ca customer. This is the result of personal contact, honest caring, and dedication to the customer.
The Calgary Sun – Darts to the hearts
FIX FOR OUR NATIONAL NIGHTMARECanada’s largest online drugstore wants everyone to know we as a people are so embarrassed to buy condoms and lubricants they are among the top stolen items at traditional drugstores. (Because getting caught shoplifting condoms and lubricant would be so much less mortifying, right?) Well.ca offers a solution: Discreet, pre-packed sets with massage, romance and even singles themes.
Appearing in editions of the Sun across Canada, Well.ca is recognized as Canada’s largest online drugstore. Being known under this title is a significant milestone for our team. We’re passionate about fulfilling the expectations that come along with this great honour. Go Well.ca.
Venture Law Lines: Did You Miss Me?
Y Combinator is a great way to sell a book and brand a startup camp, but a lousy way to make money, and it won’t replace the growth or volume venture capital can generate.
The following banner ad popped up while I was browsing the Internet:
This is absurd.
We do not sell Dermitage.
My new project, JabBox, is on to it’s first working iteration.
It was considerably harder to make a working model from my original prototype as I discovered more and more challenges. Now I realize why others haven’t done this!
The first challenge is to maintain open chats. If the browser is communicating with the webmaster, the server must maintain an open thread on behalf of the browser that can accept incoming messages from the webmaster. Open threads are a challenge in standard HTTP models. In my prototype, I hacked this using PHP, keeping page requests open that would stay alive for a long time (~5 min). PHP is really not designed for this, and times-out the pages after a while. It felt bad. It was bad.
I knew I’d want to use Java for this, but that meant learning how to code in Java again (hadn’t done so in years). Then I had to learn how to make a Java webserver. (#2 on diagram) I know nothing about this kind of stuff. I chose Jetty. The documentation on the Jetty site was confusing and it took me hours and hours (plus a bit of advice from Chris) to get a project set up. Once I got it set up, I had to port all my PHP jabber library calls to the new Smack API libraries that I was using on Java.
The second big challenge was cross-domain AJAX blocking from browsers. You see, now that we have a second HTTP server (through embedded jetty), it has to listen on a different port than Apache (unless I set up Apache’s mod_proxy which would make it complicated for others to use my software). But Firefox and IE block AJAX calls that look like they’re going to a different site for security reasons. Firefox thinks we are going to a different site when you make a call to a different port on the same server.
The solution I had for now was to set up a hand-made PHP proxy (#1 on diagram) that simply took calls and then made a second call, using libcurl, to the Jetty server. This costs extra resources and memory, but it is a simple solution that works.
Here is a diagram of how it all works:
I find it cool how many different technologies are being used here:
On the front end:
On the Backend:
Note how many of the above technologies are opensource, the starred (*) ones are tools I am using for the first time.
I will take a break from this for some days (need to clean my house) and update you all later. If you’d like to test this out on your own test site, please let me know and I can send you the files and we can work on this together. I will open something to the public as soon as the first tier of features are implemented.
Chris just passed this cover letter to me.
I have a good feeling about this candidate, I don’t know why:
I think we are an unquestioned leader in our programming niche, now that you mention it. Yes, yes we are. Unquestionably.
Ever wanted to talk to your site’s visitors? This weekend, I spent ~20 hours working on a side project called JabBox (working title). I thought it would only take me 8.
JabBox is a thing you can put in any website to enable live-chatting with your visitors.
I built it using jQuery and AJAX on the front end, a socket-based bridge on the backend which connects to an opensource Jabber server. Plus some magic in between.
(I didn’t realize that the name TokBox is taken… hence JabBox)
The beauty is that it will be free, and will allow connections to any Jabber client on the site-owners end. The front end can work on any regular browser without the need for a JavaVM or Flash and it is fully customizable — so it can integrate into any site’s design.
I feel like this is a big deal — I can’t wait to release the first version to the public as part of our proposed Well.ca R&D Labs initiative.
Here is a picture of it in action:
Contact me for more information. More soon. Let me know what you think of this idea.
