Learning a bit about some new technologies... any tips?

Question

OBJECTIVE: To learn a little more about some technologies I'm familiar with but not an expert in: Postgres, Compass/Sass, Google Maps API, Twitter API, and ASP.NET MVC 1.0, Flickr API

THE SITE: Just a fun little app with CRUD for addresses of my friends, then a page that kind of has a map of where they live, their last five tweets, and some of their flickr photos.

THE QUESTIONS:

1. I love LINQ. I mean I really love it. Probably unnaturally. How can I use LINQ and Postgres together with ASP.NET? Anyone have some experience with this? How about a good example? I mean mostly I'm just doing simple inserts and queries here, so I don't need a ton of features. I would like to make a db repository and have some IQueryables.

2. Compass docs seem woefully terse. Can someone point me to a nice set of examples...or is it really just that easy? Also, anyone have experience with it? Any snags - is it even worth it?

3. If I have, say, 50 friends and I want their last 5 tweets... Will I hit the API rate limit if I try to pull them all at once and update all of them at once, so that I don't run into network issues? Is it even worth it to do that?

4. Google are too smart for their own good. I don't really "get" the API docs. Can someone give me the 10 second overview? It's not a "mapplet" right?

Thanks in advance, you guys rock!

Edit - I'm also looking for general tips using any of those technologies!

Answer 1

1) by "linq" I am assuming you mean the Linq2Sql orm. Unfortunately, it only supports SQL server, and probably will never get any other databases since it is no longer under active development. If you really want IQueryables from an ORM pointing at postgres, your best best is NHibernate.Linq http://codebetter.com/blogs/kyle.baley/archive/2008/04/07/trying-out-linq-for-nhibernate.aspx

Answer 2

another free alternative might be http://code2code.net/DB_Linq/index.html but this is not a very mature project

Answer 3

Hi,

There are several open source LINQ projects over on CodePlex.

DBLinq: http://dblinq.codeplex.com/

LINQ to Twitter: http://linqtotwitter.codeplex.com/ (disclaimer: I wrote LINQ to Twitter)

LINQ to Google: http://glinq.codeplex.com/

LINQ to Flickr: http://linqflickr.codeplex.com/