Google’s Obfuscated TCP

Obfuscated TCP is a transport layer protocol that adds opportunistic encryption. It’s designed to hamper and detect large-scale wiretapping and corruption of TCP traffic on the Internet.

Google’s Obfuscated TCP

Rietveld Code Review Tool

Guido van Rossum, a Google App Engine developer, has released into open source the Rietveld Code Review Tool at http://codereview.appspot.com. This web application ties into a subversion repository to create a work flow for the review and commenting of newly submitted code.

This tool was born from an Google internal tool that Guido developed called Mondrian. Guido gave a Google TechTalk on the Mondrian tool called Mondrian Code Review On The Web (YouTube link). This TechTalk provides insight into how the work flow operates and how helpful a tool like this can be. Perhaps something to play with on your next project…

Resources

Overview of Rietveld Code Review Tool
http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/rietveld.html

Rietveld Code Review Tool online Demo
http://codereview.appspot.com/

Documentation
http://code.google.com/p/rietveld/w/list

Source code
http://code.google.com/p/rietveld/source/checkout

Mondrian Code Review on the Web (Google TechTalk Video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMql3Di4Kgc

Ajax Performance Analysis

IBM developerWorks has a great article by Kristopher William Zyp on the tools and methods used to analyze Ajax application performance titled Ajax performance analysis. It provides a good overview of what affects an Ajax based application, the tools to probe these aspects and actions developers can take to help speed things up. Much of the information revolves around YSlow and Firebug and provides a great overview for developers who may be unfamiliar with nuances of client side development.

Resources

Ajax performance analysis
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-aj-perform/

Say Hi to Aptana Cloud

Aptana, the creators of one of the best web development IDE’s on the planet, has been broadening its product offering. One of them is the Aptana Cloud, its answer to providing an elastic web application platform.

So what makes Aptana Cloud different? From the looks of it they are offering an very specific LAMP based architecture stack that has tight integration with the Aptana IDE. They Offer developers synchronization and deployment management tools as well as an “integrated service management console”. Aptana Cloud offers administrators management tools, dashboards & stats, Google analytics integration, status tools and backup options. They offer development teams the ability to manage access to projects through Roles and Rights.

The interesting difference is that Aptana is partnering with Joyent to implement the Aptana Cloud solution on Joyents virtulatization platform. Aptana expects that in the future developers can select from a list of virtulatization providers including Amazon and Google.

From the sound of it Aptana is really looking to place their IDE at the center of web application development and give developers all they features they need to implement, deploy and manage web applications with one tool. The service is currently in closed beta but you can request early access (I signed up several weeks ago and no word yet).

Resources

Aptana Cloud
http://www.aptana.com/cloud

Cappuccino, Objective-J, and 280Slides.com

A great podcast interview by the folks at Ajaxian with some guys from 280 North, the creators of 280Slides.com. They discuss some details and motivations behind their new Cappuccino JavaScript framework and their new “Objective” version of JavaScript they call Objective-J. The guys at 280 North come from an Apple development background, so they took what they know and love, Object C and the Apple “Core” frameworks and ported them off the mac and onto the web. As you can see from their work on 280Slides.com, it has that OS X look and feel about it. Although the intent is to release Cappuccino to everyone I can’t seem to get my hands on it yet. You can check out the entire 18 minute interview with the player below or download the podcast yourself.

Resources

Objective-J website

280Slides Application

Google Provides Hosting for Popular Ajax Libraries

Google has created the Ajax Libraries API. Basically Google is calling it a content distribution network and loading architecture for the most popular open source JS libraries. These libraries include:

• jQuery
• prototype
• script.aculo.us
• MooTools
• dojo

If you use the Google JS API, you can do stuff like:

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<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script>
  // Load jQuery
  google.load("jquery", "1");
 
  // on page load complete, fire off a jQuery json-p query
  // against Google web search
  google.setOnLoadCallback(function() {
    $.getJSON("http://ajax.googleapis.com"+
    "/ajax/services/search/web?q=google&;v=1.0&;callback=?",
 
      // on search completion, process the results
      function (data) {
        if (data.responseDate.results &&
            data.responseDate.results.length>0) {
          renderResults(data.responseDate.results);
        }
      });
    });
</script>

Notice the dynamic loading of the jQuery library. Not a fan of the Google JS API? No worries, Google publishes the direct URLs for all the various javascript library files including minimized and full versions.

Resources

AJAX Libraries API
http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/

Documentation
http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/documentation/index.html

Google Maps API for Flash

Earlier this month (5/14/08 @ 05:40 PST) Google announced the Google Maps API for Flash. One of the changes that you notice right off is the difference and smoothness in animation. Its great to finally have the ability to integrate this mapping application into a flash experience and have access to the geo API natively.

Resources
Announcement
http://googlemapsapi.blogspot.com/2008/05/introducing-google-maps-api-for-flash.html

Documentation & examples
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/flash/

Note
Google Maps API for Flash is not the only kid on the block with a Flash based mapping solution: Universal ActionScript 3.0 Mapping API

What makes a design “Googley”?

I ran across this post on the Google Blog describing what makes a web design Googly. Here are Googles 10 design principles:

1. Focus on people—their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Every millisecond counts.
3. Simplicity is powerful.
4. Engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Dare to innovate.
6. Design for the world.
7. Plan for today’s and tomorrow’s business.
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Be worthy of people’s trust.
10. Add a human touch.

Its hard to argue with this list. But as Google alludes to in their post, true success comes from the right balance of all ten. Something that always seems illusive when your in the thick of it, but extraordinarily simple when viewed after the fact.

Interview with Joseph Smarr, the Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo

A great podcast via IT Conversations, Technometria series. In depth discussion of Ajax implementations, design considerations and toolkits. It offers some great insight into Ajax application development by a veteran in field.

IT Conversations Overview

In this edition of Technometria, Phil and Scott talk to Joseph Smarr, the Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo. Plaxo makes great use of AJAX in its product offerings. The gang starts by discussing techniques for overcoming cross-site scripting limitations including Javascript workholes and JSON APIs (also known as JSON-P or JSON callbacks).

The talk turns to performance considerations for Web sites making heavy use of Javascript and some techniques for making AJAX faster. Finally the show ends with a discussion of the coming open social Web and the current state of the OpenSocial proposal.

You can also get more info over at IT Conversations page

Amazon Web Services Lowers its Data Transfer Fees – Slightly

The following email was sent to Amazon Web Services customers on 4/23/08 announcing the new pricing structure for data transfers

Dear Amazon Web Services developers,

We’ve often told you that one of our goals is to drive down costs continuously and to pass those savings on to you. We have been able to reduce our costs for data transfer, so we’re pleased to announce that we’re lowering our pricing for data transfer, effective May 1, 2008. You’ll notice below that we’ve reduced price at every existing usage tier of transfer out, as well as added an additional tier for the heaviest users.

Current data transfer price (through April 30, 2008)
$0.100 per GB – data transfer in
$0.180 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.160 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB – data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of the Amazon service. Data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3-US, Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon SQS is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB). Data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3-Europe will be charged at regular rates.

New data transfer price (effective May 1, 2008)
$0.100 per GB – data transfer in
$0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.110 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB – data transfer out / month over 150 TB

Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of the Amazon service. Data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3-US, Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon SQS is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB). Data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3-Europe will be charged at regular rates.

The result of this pricing change is that all customers will see a reduction in the price of transfer out. For example, a customer transferring 50TB a month will save 16% and a customer transferring 500TB a month will save 26% on transfer with the new pricing. Please see http://aws.amazon.com for full pricing information for each service.

Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services Team