Recently I've been looking into a powerful but complex web application technology we're considering using in future versions of the Hub.

The problem: how do we update a browser view when a background process updates the database?

A few examples of places in the Hub where this comes up...

More power, control, flexibility and automation of cloud servers.

Alan Kay once said: "Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible". We live by those words, and I think we've done a pretty good job up until now.

The Hub makes launching and managing instances on Amazon EC2 really simple, but the one thing that has been missing is a solution to make complex things possible - i.e., programmatic control.

Last week we announced the release of TurnKey Hub v1.0. The response was great, signups went through the roof and many of you went the extra mile and provided detailed feedback on your first impressions from the new version.

First, a little background

Django has an excellent messages framework which provides support for cookie and session-based messaging, for both anonymous and authenticated users.

The messages framework allows you to temporarily store messages in one request, and retrieve them for display in a subsequent request (usually the next one). Every message is tagged with a specific level determining its priority (e.g. success, info, error).

For example, in a view you can send a message: