Chris’ Musings

For a client I need to write a new client that will be used to a) create and manage user accounts  b) upload very large files (cd/dvd images).  So we want to use a cloud service that has large bandwidth and file capacity.  In essence, we want the file upload process to be as quick as possible for the user.  Hosting our own bandwidth (with simultaneous connections) would be prohibitively expensive – the client has no existing infrastructure for an application of this nature.

I am exporing using either Amazon EC2/S3 or Google AppEngine.  I’m drawn at least intially to GAE since it is free to develop on.  I’m hoping to architect the application so that I can easily port it to EC2/S3 if we desire.  Some things to evaluate:

• what data store access method to use
• what upload code is required

For the second requirement, we are going to require Google Gears so that we can have background / restartable uploads.  It’s always fun learning new things.  Any experiences people care to share would be appreciated.

We are in the process of having one of our applications certified to be PCI compliant.   On our first attempt, we had only a handful of items to address.  Most of them we were able to correct in an afternoon.  The last outstanding one deals with how our SSL is configured.  Basically, the PCI standard does not allow for SSL2.  This is easy enough to correct with some directives in the web server configuration.  The issue that I am trying to research is what affect this will have on browsers.

Specifically, does IE 6 support SSL3.  Or do some of the IE6 version not suport it.  The application is a consumer application that uses SSL and we want to make sure we are not excluding some users because the are on an older browser.  Time to open up google and do some research.