WarpShare™

Introduction to Tarzan

We’ve been quiet here lately because we’ve been hyper-focused on fundraising, but I wanted to take a moment to properly introduce some code we open-sourced last spring, known as Tarzan.

One facet of WarpShare’s ultimate goal is to become the “Library of Congress” for digital media. As you can imagine, this requires a crap-ton of processing, storage, databasing, and infrastructure in general. Since we’re an early-stage startup with no major financial backing yet, we realized that cloud computing (and related things) would be a fantastic way for us to get rolling. The ability to pay for usage instead of having to buy servers up-front is a huge thing for us. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the answer to our prayers.

I’ll let you read up on AWS on your own, but in a nutshell you can utilize Amazon’s pay-per-use infrastructure via web service APIs. We’re a PHP shop, so I sat down, began digging through the online documentation, and started putting together a series of classes to interact with the services we knew we were going to use. Back in 2005, I’d started a project that interacted with Amazon’s E-Commerce Service (ECS, now known as Amazon Associates Web Service (AAWS)). I called this project Tarzan since it worked with Amazon Web Services (get it?). I decided to restart the project, throw out the code that sucked, and begin adding support for cloud computing, online storage, messaging, and simple databasing.

In April 2008, we decided that although the project was still a bit immature it was good enough to open up to the larger community (with the very liberal Simplified BSD License) with the hope that we could begin collaborating with other developers who were also interested in seeing a project like this become more useful. We also knew what we were up against: “official” PHP APIs provided by Amazon themselves, along with a barrage of other AWS-related projects that were — for the most part — little more than itch-and-scratch-ware.

In the few months since we released our code to the open-source community, we’ve had people like you submit a variety of bugs and patches, we’ve had some really cool features requested (and implemented), we’ve received some terrific feedback from our users, and we’ve put a TON of time into making the project better for the entire Tarzan community — including ourselves. But we know there’s still much to do.

In an effort to make a bigger splash in the AWS development community, we’re going to be launching a brand-new Tarzan website in the next couple of weeks. The goal being not only give Tarzan more users, but also more feedback, more bug reports and patches, more cool features, better approaches to new and existing methods, and all that other good stuff. It should be noted that Tarzan is not a diversion from WarpShare’s goals, but rather a fundamental piece that will help us reach them.

As part of the new site, we’re going to be integrating a wiki for ad-hoc and community-contributed documentation and tutorials, publishing how-to videos, showcasing the cool things that people are building with Tarzan, (hopefully) bringing on additional developers, and encouraging the Tarzan community to grow beyond the walls of the WarpShare office.

We look forward to watching this project and community grow, and expect more great things in the future.

Categories: Tarzan, The Future and What we're doing

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