Nitrogen, Riak, and 1,000 Lines of Erlang

UPDATE: See the video of my talk on Nitrogen, Riak, and SlideBlast.com.

Check out SlideBlast.com, a tool I created that lets you share and control a slide presentation on the web. SlideBlast was built using Nitrogen and Riak, and is an example of exactly how much you can do with the right tools and 1,000 lines of code. (Ok, it’s more like 1,130 lines, but who’s counting?)

The full source code is available on GitHub: http://github.com/rklophaus/SlideBlast

How it Works

Upload a .pdf or .zip file.
Share a link with your remote audience.
Start presenting. As you flip through slides, your attendees’ slides change, too.

Components

SlideBlast runs on Erlang and uses the following projects:

Nitrogen to create a slick, Comet-based user interface.
Riak to store slide show data (including the images) with a flexible schema.
Mochiweb as the underlying HTTP server.
Ghostscript to split and convert .pdf files into images.
Imagemagick to create image thumbnails.
SyntaxHighlighter to transform uploaded code files into beautiful HTML.
(Try uploading an .erl, .cs, .cpp, .js, .java, .sh, or .sql file!)

Why I Built SlideBlast.com

I built SlideBlast for my talk Nitrogen and Riak by Example, presented at the Erlang User Conference 2009 in Stockholm, Sweden. In the presentation, I briefly cover both Nitrogen and Riak, and then describe some of the techniques used to build SlideBlast. The video should be online soon, check it out.

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