Show HN: Crondom

by mathgladiator • 16 years ago

62 56 16 years ago

This is my first real node.js product that I'm taking into production, and I'm looking for feedback. Thank You.

Please try to break it since it is really fresh. I should have the /etc/init.d stuff and a while true; do bash script set up, so it should come back if it crashes. I would like to have it not crash, but if it does, then things should come back online. It is using https://github.com/mathgladiator/win and https://github.com/mathgladiator/servy

npad• 16 years ago

"10 Things you can do with crondom.com that you can't do with crontab: 1. Run a job every 7 minutes"

I thought you could just do:

  */7 * * * * whatever...

lhnn• 16 years ago

*/7, but ya.

That is a Linuxism. I found out the hard way setting up some Solaris 9 scripts last summer.

tzs• 16 years ago

It is in OS X cron too.

there• 16 years ago

it's a vixie cron'ism. vixie cron is in all the bsds, linuxes, and mac os.

liuliu• 16 years ago

I don't know. It feels like with this line, the job will be run at 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49, 56, thus, between 56 and the next 7, you will have 11 minutes interval. Not that familiar with crontab, I may be wrong here.

jackowayed• 16 years ago

Correct

yycom• 16 years ago

How else would you divide 60 by 7?

SriniK• 16 years ago

I am ignorant on specific time requirements on running crontabs but I always do either 6min or 10min or something which is divisible.

Are there any specific app requirements in running 7min or 17sec?

alanh• 16 years ago

Would be hilarious if the UI was a text box where it said “type a Crontab line.”

Seriously though, sounds easy to use, if perhaps a bit overpriced for something I’d mostly want to use on small or personal projects.

mike-cardwell8• 16 years ago

It strikes me as the sort of thing that should be one function of a much larger app. Not a standalone app on its own. If the intention is to make it a paid for service, I simply don't think it's worth paying for. Other people might be willing to pay for it, but I'm not sure exactly who.

IgorPartola• 16 years ago

Some of the features sound neat. The question in my mind is, how do the jobs on the Crondom server trigger local scripts? Also the name is both cool and terrible: it reads like condom everytime I glance at it.

makuro• 16 years ago

Why is it called Crondom? It sounds a bit like some form of 'protection' for cron.

endlessvoid94• 16 years ago

That was also my first thought.

uuilly• 16 years ago

It's a perfect name b/c I don't need this tool now, but I probably will later. And I will never, EVER forget the name. Kudos.

delano3• 16 years ago

It's great to live in a time when developers can build products for other developers.

gibsonf1• 16 years ago

I was thinking an image of a "hot babe" on the landing page would add a little more humor to the domain name.

moeffju2• 16 years ago

No, it would merely add sexism. Don't be sexist.

catshirt• 16 years ago

I actually didn't even consider that far; I stopped after "why would you name your product something like condom".

To be fair, it's a solid idea that I imagine would do well regardless of the name. To continue being fair, it's hard to picture the name not being a point of friction in at least some scenarios For instance, picking the name out of a list of possible choices. There are unfortunately likely more limiting scenarios than that.

mathgladiator9• 16 years ago

I'll probably launch a better brand-name that's more family safe, but when I thought up this name my gut instinct was a giant "YES, this is so awesome".

mathgladiator9• 16 years ago

I got the idea from pingdom.com , and then I put crondom.com together and my mind was utterly juvenile and told me "WOW, this is the best thing EVAR".

jarin• 16 years ago

Hey, just a small thing but when trying to sign up it's saying my me@robotmo.de email address is invalid.

cj• 16 years ago

Side note: Registration rejects paton@bu.edu as an invalid email.

m_eiman• 16 years ago

Adding a bit of info about what I'd need to implement on my end would be useful. I'm assuming that this will fetch a HTTP URL once per "hit"?

mathgladiator9• 16 years ago

I'll make that generally accessible from the landing page, and It's available within the site.

http://crondom.com/documentation

(very hastily written)

pshirishreddy• 16 years ago

why not put an openID login. I find a lot of new review my app's but every app I find points me to register as a new user. Why doesn't it use some thing like openID where I can easily login to test it for my needs.

mathgladiator9• 16 years ago

I plan to add that to the standard win user system ( https://github.com/mathgladiator/win/blob/master/pages/std.w... ).

tjansen• 16 years ago

I haven't bothered to register yet, but after looking at the site I don't understand what it does. You say that it's a cron replacement. So is it a software package that you sell? For which platforms? Or is it some kind of SAAS that does something (like doing HTTP requests, or invoke something on my server using some unspecified protocol)?

I honestly don't have any idea what it does. All I know is that it does something in configurable intervals. I guess some additional info on the site would be helpful :)

M1573RMU74710N• 16 years ago

I think it's a way to schedule a visit from a dominatrix?

mathgladiator9• 16 years ago

It's basically an HTTP crontab replacement that does a bit more than crontab. Crontab is very regular where as crondom can be irregular. For instance, When there is a lot of events to handle, you want polling to be very fast (1 second resolution). However, where there are very few events, you want the polling to be very slow (every 2 minutes). crondom enables this use case by enabling the developer to determine how long to wait until the next hit.

You can also break up a cron job into # of clients. This enables you to process reasonable large # of clients by giving each client a URL to go with rather than doing the work at the moment. For instance, you want to pull 1000 user twitter feed every day. Well, if it takes 1 second, then you have 1000 seconds of work for the script, or 16 minutes. Most developers are forced to live within 30 seconds per request.

In this same scenario, what happens when it fails for user 377? what happens for 378? Handling errors is not always straight forward especially from a business case. Ideally, crondom will enable us to graph for failure cases (coming soon) and isolate which part of the cron task failed.

jayeshsalvi• 16 years ago

Can it do: Twit Goodbye when I die. ?

mathgladiator9• 16 years ago

No, but that does sound like an interesting service. ObitWatch

nicksergeant• 16 years ago

Site seems to be down. Would love to check it out, though.

mathgladiator9• 16 years ago

I'm learning a lot about production node.js and what happens when things go very wrong... Will blog about it.

jules• 16 years ago

Awesome name. The site is down though. Edit: back up now.

Show HN: Crondom

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