Is there a counter API - a counter-as-a-service?

POST /api/counter?id=1234
Content-Length: n

5

each POST returns a new number?

Somebody must have built this

http://numeri.xyz First result on google for "counter as a service"

@mnzt, lol - I google for a bit but not with those search terms

😄 All about the foogle 😉

I feel as if I just willed an API into existence - just by insisting that it must exist

that API is perfect 🙂

We have an internal one that works very similarly. Written in Clojure too 😉

Not accessible to the world though

@carr0t let me guess - builder numbers?

builder numbers?

I meant "build numbers", sorry

that's my use case - a source for sequential serial numbers to use as a build number, without worrying about atomic data store

Aah, no. We track changes to a database, and want to identify, given 2 arbitrary events both of which represent a change, which came first

So we get them in order, the first thing we do more or less is assign each event a unique incrementing ID, and from then on anywhere we need to compare events and know which came first we can, and ordering becomes much less of an issue

@pesterhazy why not use a uuid for that

oh order, I see

UUID version 1 has a time-based component in it though. But an obvious solution would be to build this service yourself and just use increasing longs or whatever

Or if you’re using a database that all your services are talking to you could (ab)use that, by having an autoincrementing id 🙂

One of our legacy systems does that. It doesn't scale so well for large numbers of updates 😉

Add a database, just run a docker container 😉

I guess first requesting an id from a service also would be terribly slow with a large number of updates

The Clojure version basically grabs a 'block' of IDs per prefix, 10000 at a time, and hands them out as fast as requests can be made. If the service restarts or whatever we lose the remaining IDs from that block, but don't actually care

Each service uses a different prefix, so we only actually pay the cost in anything other than memory comparatively rarely

Can be a remote HTTP service, or just a local lib. But the local lib only works if you are sure you won't have 2 services using the same prefix

sounds good

you might look up "snowflake" or "flake" IDs

there are a bunch of java/clojure implementations and variations that are either coordinated over the network or uncoordinated (relying on something like ms precision over network time plus some number of bits for randomness)

it depends on your use case what you actually need

We considered flake IDs but they didn't fit our requirements. It was a good few months ago now though so I can't immediately recall why

Interesting post: https://stackoverflow.com/a/5685869/6264

@carr0t > you make a network call to get a unique ID this is probably the reason you didn’t choose this one (don’t know if that Twitter thing can generate many at once)

Also it seems they deprecated that library in favor of Finagle

I've used implementations that maintain a thread-safe collection of IDs in a background thread such that each request doesn't need to do a network call

I've also used them where there was no network coordination and relied on some number of bits identifying a shard or being something like timeset from an epoch + bits of randomness

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@borkdude I would have loved to use something that doesn't require coordination, but the requirements are that it has to be sequential

I need naming help. I'm building a GUI. I need a word to capture "state of entire screen" on a laptop/desktop, I would use the word "desktop" for a phone/tablet, what is the right word?

home screen?

home-screen brings up images of a phone showing all apps as icons

I thought that's what you meant by desktop 😜

is that what 'desktop' means ? I thought it was this system where you had windows + you could drag them around

maybe what I meant to say is 'window manager'

I'd say most people would use desktop for 'initial screen with a wallpaper and some shortcuts'

alright, so I guess I really want is the phone/tablet version of "windowManager" - but that doesn't really exist since most phones/tablets either single task or splits creen at most

@qqq the current android has more arbitrary window management (not to say it’s intuitive to use, but it’s more than just split windows)

mobile-graphic-system?

why not just “window-manager” or “window-system”