Description:

The need to maintain social activity feeds is an increasingly useful thing in a variety of software. Whether its a project management app or a social site, many kinds of software can make use of a list of events that have happened in the system, filtered for each user and listed in reverse chronological order. However, this sort of data presents many storage and privacy challenges.

Gowalla has built Chronologic to meet all these needs. Chronologic is an application built for dealing with events, timelines, and pushing those events to the right subscribers. It is a general service for dealing with activity feeds. On top of that, it implements privacy, a flexible follow model, and the ability to fetch incremental updates to a feed.

Chronologic is built with Ruby, Sinatra, and Cassandra. We'll show how this trio played nicely together and how it could be improved. Most importantly, we'll show how to get started with Chronologic, how to adapt it to your own application, and how to deploy it in your datacenter.