WarpShare™

Tarzan supports CloudFront and Windows AMIs

As you may or may not have noticed, I’ve recently begun splitting up the documentation for releases. There is documentation for a given pre-release (currently only 2008.10.10) as well as docs for the trunk build.

The latest trunk build has fixed a number of bugs and finally includes COMPLETE support for EC2 and Amazon Associates. All of the methods have been implemented and documented in all classes now (except for incomplete support for logging in S3). The latest builds also have support for the new Amazon CloudFront service which provides a CDN for your S3 content.

There are only 5 known bugs left before I announce an official “2.0″ release. The latest trunk builds are STABLE, and I would encourage everyone currently using Tarzan to begin using the latest development build to help us catch any remaining bugs before the big release. I’ll probably branch off a new pre-release before the end of the weekend as the last pre-release before 2.0.

You can see the remaining bugs for 2.0, and download the latest development build.

Categories: Announcements and Tarzan

Ugly Babies

Earlier today I noticed that we’ve been pretty quiet lately… and we’ve been especially quiet about the business/vision side of things. Perhaps that’s a bit of a problem. Perhaps not.

I can say that although I personally put a lot of time into Tarzan, it’s not our only product. I know it may seem that way with as much as I’ve blogged about it over the past few months and how little we’ve blogged about anything else, but we’re definitely working toward a larger goal.

Like most companies (and DEFINITELY like most startups), we’ve been squeezed for cash and resources for quite some time now. This isn’t a secret with tech companies laying off over 50k employees in recent months, and Citibank laying off nearly 60k alone. We’re still pre-funding — major funding, anyway — so we’re building as quickly as we can with extremely limited resources. People have asked us if we’re going to keep going even if we run out of money, to which I explain that we’ve been out of money for most of our company’s history. It hasn’t stopped us yet, and it’s not going to stop us now.

We still have a long way to go before we reach our vision. In the meantime, however, we’re planning to have our alpha-quality “ugly baby” release in March 2009. It’ll be enough to show our friends-and-family investors, and long-time watchers, that WarpShare isn’t vaporware. We’re excited to see the progress that’s been happening lately, and we hope to have something for you to begin checking out in the next few months. From there, we hope to attract some cash and talent to help us build out what we believe is the next game-changing business in digital media and advertising.

“Game changing? Sure thing, Ryan.” I know, I know. Every startup thinks that they have something game changing… which is a big reason why they do it. But when it comes to digital media and advertising, it appears (from what we’ve seen so far) that everybody is still thinking inside the box. They’re not re-thinking the proposed solutions. They’re still putting the consumer/end-user last and Big/Old Media and Advertisers first. Tsk, tsk.

If you’re curious to know more about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, get in touch. We’d love to talk to you.

Categories: The Future and What we're doing

New Tarzan pre-release is available!

Today we announce an updated Tarzan pre-release build for any developers not using the subversion trunk. A lot of work has gone into Tarzan over the past 2 months since the last release, namely:

• Added the ability to change the content-type of an existing object in S3.
• Fixed some minor bugs in SimpleDB and S3.
• Re-wrote all of the documentation in the entire project (which enables us to generate awesome documentation which can be found on the Tarzan documentation page).
• Launched an entirely new website!
• Added support for caching frequently requested data to enhance performance. Caching types currently include file-based, APC, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. Informal tests tend to show a speed-up of between 600x-1000x, depending on the request and the type of cache being used.

If you’d rather not use the bleeding-edge subversion trunk builds, you can grab the latest pre-release build from the Tarzan download page. Check it out!

Categories: Tarzan and WarpShare