October 2014 Summaries

Stream Framework 1.1 has been released following its rebranding from Feedly, with its development gaining momentum as the community grows rapidly. The project encourages contributions, particularly in areas like Python 3 support, documentation improvements, and a database backend for small projects, while also outlining future plans for relevancy-based feeds and API support for other languages. Recent updates include enhancements such as customizable Activity objects in feeds, hooks for metric collection, updates to CQLengine and Python-Driver, filtering and ordering capabilities for Redis and Cassandra feeds, and various Redis improvements. Users are advised to use the latest stable versions of Redis and Cassandra, and feedback is welcomed from those experimenting with newer Cassandra versions.

Introduction Stream's hosted newsfeed API offers a cost-effective alternative to in-house solutions by eliminating maintenance and reducing development time. The blog post analyzes the monthly costs of various in-house solutions compared to GetStream's Entry plan, which is priced at $50 per month. The comparison involves three common in-house solutions: using Redis as feed cache storage, Redis as primary feed storage, and Cassandra or MongoDB as feed storage. Each of these solutions requires AWS infrastructure and incurs additional monthly costs for components like task brokers and web workers, making them more expensive than GetStream's offering. Redis as feed cache storage is the least expensive in-house option, costing $142 or more per month, while Redis as primary storage and Cassandra/MongoDB solutions can cost $342 and $382 monthly, respectively. The post concludes that even the simplest in-house deployment is significantly more costly than GetStream's plan, highlighting the financial advantage of opting for a hosted API solution.

The announcement introduces the first example application in a series designed to demonstrate the ease of integrating news feeds using GetStream, specifically using Python and the Django framework. The application, a simple Pinterest clone, includes user, flat, and aggregated feeds, and is easily deployable on Heroku with minimal effort. Despite being a demonstration tool rather than a production-ready application, it serves as a starting point for developers to explore Stream's capabilities and features, such as the Manager class for API interactions and enrichment functions. The example is structured to prioritize simplicity and integration clarity, offering insights into working with Stream APIs to manage activities and feeds.