Interview: Dave Hoff and Anthony Webb of IMified · 571 words posted 02/28/2007 05:29 PM
Dave Hoff and Anthony Webb recently launched IMified, “an instant messenger buddy that works across all major IM networks and offers access to a growing number of web applications.” While I’ve worked with the ColdFusion Event Gateway to build automated bots in the past, I’ve never seen the Event Gateway used so well for such broad purposes under a heavy load: IMified provides a single chat interface to Basecamp, Remember the Milk, Google Calendar, and more. I asked Dave and Anthony to talk about their service. And if you haven’t checked out IMified yet, it’s worth your time.
since1968: IMified is one of those great ideas that seem obvious only in hindsight: an IM content aggregator. How did you come up with the idea?
IMified: The idea for IMified came about when I was looking for an easier way to post todo’s to my Basecamp account. I found myself neglecting to add stuff to my projects because the process to do so was too cumbersome. Basecamp is a service I use a lot but doesn’t really warrant me leaving it open in my browser all day. I use IM throughout the day for staying in touch with colleagues and family. It’s always open and available, yet unobtrusive and was a logical interface to “fire and forget” simple data entry tasks.
since1968: Rails gets most of the “Web 2.0” attention. How did you decide to use ColdFusion?
IMified: Choosing anything other than CF as platform wasn’t really an option. Anthony and I are CF developers. When the concept for IMified was finally laid out, ColdFusion became the logical option due in most part to the excellent Event Gateways that are offered out of the box in the enterprise edition. The event gateways allow us to tightly integrate with the IM networks we connect to.
since1968: You say on your blog that your initial growth was almost accidental. For all we know you guys may be running a higher load on the CF Event Gateway than anyone else. What is your load?
IMified: Before launching IMified we did some research and tried to find others out there making use of CF’s Event Gateways under a heavy load. We didn’t find much information to go off of and were really surprised to see that the event gateways were so under utilized. We are handling a very heavy load and CF has handled this load like a champ! Our down time to date has been due to problems with some of the IM networks we run on and one out of control log file that grew to 30gb. In just 3 weeks of operation, our users have completed over 60,000 tasks through IMified!
since1968: What pitfalls did you encounter with the Event Gateways?
IMified: Honestly, none. There haven’t been any surprises as of yet and we don’t expect to see any soon. We’re really impressed with their performance, stability, and ease of use.
since1968: Do you have plans to monetize IMified?
IMified: Yes, we most certainly do. Someones got to pay for all this bandwidth! In the next few weeks we’ll be launching the next phase of IMified that we feel will really change the way people think of IM. We want IMified to be your go-to buddy when you need to get something done at your desk or on your mobile. Somewhere in there will be a business model. Hint hint… API.
since1968: Thanks for your time.
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4. On Mar 5, 03:27 PM Kyle Hayes said:
Great interview! Let’s make this post known to continue to boost ColdFusion’s popularity and why it is the way to go. Very happy that IMified saw the light and took action.
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1. On Mar 2, 02:34 PM Damon Cooper said:
Glad you guys liked the EG’s. For the record, we tuned & tweaked the ultra-lightweight Event Gateway architecture in ColdFusion 7 to within an inch of it’s life. We clocked up something like 2.4M msgs/minute with a special Tuning Gateway (cheap-o 2-cpu Intel box we had back in 2004 when we were working on this stuff) so we know the basic architecture performs and scales very, very well. We then performed the same exercise on each of the individual commercial Gateways ColdFusion ships with (IBM/Lotus Sametime, XMPP/Jabber Gateway, etc, etc). In CF 7.0.2, we added more Gateways, and of course, the Gateway architecture is fully extensible.
(Your mileage will vary, and each gateway type obviously has to do more than throw msgs into the abyss, like our special Tuning Gateway did, but you get the idea…fundamentally, you can run the American Idol SMS voting TV show off this thing…as long as the provider at the other is ready to handle the load!)
PS: the SMPP SMS Gateway has been certified by ATT Wireless/Cingular, so it really IS ready for the next big game show, if you have a good idea for one :)
Damon
#Director of Engineering, ColdFusion
Adobe