First version of clan.cx online

I’ve put online an early version of clan.cx. It’s a site to host and manage StarCraft 2 clans.

This version is not really intended to be used yet. It’s a first milestone, I wanted to have something online before the end of January. There’s a rudimentary forum and that’s it. It’s so basic that I don’t expect anybody could get anything out of it right now.

In the coming weeks and months, I’ll add more features and polish it. There’s still a lot of work to do. I hope the service will be useful for people in a few months. My plan is to charge users directly if the service is successful, as I don’t believe in Ad-sponsored hosting.

For those interested here is what I’ve used to build this first version:

I’ve started working on it in September. First I used SQLAlchemy and PostgreSQL to store objects. A few weeks later I started another version without SQLAlchemy, where I wrote the SQL myself. I like minimalism, and I was spending too much time learning SQLAlchemy. SQLAlchemy is powerful and well designed, but it’s also big and complex.

In October I realized that SQLAlchemy wasn’t really the problem. I just wanted to ditch SQL with all its limitations and weirdness. Using SQL based databases is a frustrating exercise, and it was really time to get out of this hell. I knew about alternative “NoSQL” databases like MongoDB, Tokyo & Kyoto cabinet, and CouchDB but none of them really clicked. The one I liked most was Redis, but at the time it didn’t guarantee persistence. If Redis crashed, you could lose data. When I checked again, Redis had a “Append Only File”, it’s a log that guarantees that data wont get lost.

Redis is exactly the quite of software I like. Its scope is limited, it’s small, the design is simple, and it’s fast. Unfortunately I’ve spend far too much time building an ORM for Redis. Building the first version took almost 1 months, and delayed me significantly. That’s why being your own boss can be a trap, you can do “things right”, but having the pressure to get things done quickly has its advantages too. The ORM is not ready for public consumption yet, but it’s already usable for 90% of what you would want to do. I might start a small documentation later this year and release it.

I’ve also built a small library to handle form. Other libraries like Formencode, WTForms, or Fungiform are a little too complex to use and yet they don’t do all I want. In retrospect I should have realized that form handling is hard! I shouldn’t have build yet another form library, it doesn’t solve the form problem very well and I have to maintain it. I might get rid of it and use something else later.

I’ll try to have an update about the development of clan.cx every month or so.

If my writing sparked any ideas, questions, or insights, I would love to hear from you.
Email me at henry@precheur.org I read and respond to each email.