App Engine is a system for running applications on Googles infrastructure. It DOES NOT emulate a virtual system like EC2. Because of this, you have to follow Google rules for application development:
- Current Python only
- A YAML based app config file allows you to provide meta data about the app and do URL to “action” mapping
- Most all python frameworks are supported - Google seems to make special considerations for Django
- Some aspects of the python feature set are disabled like local file I/O, Sockets, ect
- Google provides APIs for common app tasks like DB storage, User authentication, URL fetching and email.
- A Windows, OS X & Linux based SDK is available that provides app engine emulation locally as well as the tools to publish your app
- Some current limitations include: “500MB of persistent storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for 5 million monthly page views.”
Its currently in Beta and theirs a waiting list to get an account. No cost structure announced yet (currently its free). It will be very interesting to see how this develops.
Further Resources
Google App Engine Blog & Launch Announcement
Google App Engine Home
What is Google App Engine? (an overview)
Google 10 minute video demo (YouTube)
Google App Engine FAQs
Collection of vintage logos from a mid-70’s edition of the book World of Logotypes. You can see the full set here: Vintage Logos
Notchup aims to get you paid for doing interviews. It’s currently in private beta. Basically potential employers review your profile and make you an offer to come in for an interview. It can slurp up your LinkedIn profile which is nice. Also if you turn your friends on to NotchUp you can receive a 10% referral fee for each interview they do. You do have the option of hiding your information from independent recruiters or specific company’s (like your current employer). The site is free for job seekers and companies foot the bill for each interview. (more…)
Over a year after its release and various price drops around the globe the PS2 still out sold the PS3 this holiday season. Wow…
Sony boasts PlayStation holiday sales numbers
I have been using Jing (by TechSmith) for months now to take on-the-fly screen captures and screen casts and sharing them with friends and colleagues. Prior to Jing I was (and still am) a big fan of SnagIt (also by TechSmith). If you’re familiar with SnagIt then you will notice that Jing picks up where SnagIt leaves off: Online sharing built in and its Free!
(more…)
Will the next browser war focus on Web Standards?
The future is looking bright for web developers. IE8 has passed the Acid2 test. Firefox 3 also passed a little while back. As a web developer this is very encouraging. I believe that the standardization of the web has played a big role in the development of the technologies and patterns which drive much of what we consider to be “Web 2.0″. Whether those standards come about in an organized fashion (like the W3C DOM) or they are adopted organically by the market (like the adoption of Microsoft’s XMLHttpRequest). Once developers can stop focusing on how to build something and spend more time on what to build great things start to happen.
Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone
Firefox 3.0: Passes Acid 2 CSS Test
Privacy in the world of web services
Kent Brewster over at kentbrewster.com has a couple of articles on how developers can see if user are logged into Nextflix or Facebook. The approach involves pinging the site’s JavaScript services and looking at the result to determine the users logged in state. I’ve got to hand it to Kent on his creativity.
This seems to be raising some issues around privacy. I personally don’t see the big issue. If the services used in Kent’s examples are not intended to share information with the public, then the service simply contains a design flaw and should incorporate some sort of authentication token as an input to its service calls. If these services are meant to share information with the public, for example they could be used in a mashup to gather presence information for users of a site, then there is not any notion of privacy with the service to begin with.
How to Tell if a User is Logged In to Facebook
How to Tell if a User is Logged In to Netflix
SimpleDB, Amazon’s latest web service
Amazon latest web service is SimpleDB. Its in a limited (read private) beta at the moment. However you can sign yourself up and get on the weighting list. I received the following message after signing up:
The Limited Beta will be opened to the public in the next few weeks. We will contact you via e-mail when the beta program opens and a spot becomes available.
The service does sacrifice some flexibility for scalability. There is a great overview at snarfed.org which I encourage you to check out.
Amazon SimpleDB
Amazon SimpleDB Developers Guide
Amazon SimpleDB Thoughts (snarfed.org)
Google’s Code Search provides some insight into the troubled minds of developers. Ben Orenstein at codeulate highlights some of the more entertaining code comments. I also believe this documents the first known use of the term “lametarded”.
Granted access to billions of lines of code and the awesome power of Google’s search technology, I did what any rational, thinking programmer would do: I typed in some profanity and hit enter.
F*cking programming
I found myself needing a simple entity conversion tool when working with XML files. Not finding exactly what I needed online I finally broke down and created my own. I refined it a bit and posted it up.
Check it out: Simple Entity Converter
Update: 12/18/07
I have been doing a little tweaking:
- Minor updates to the layout
- Broke the entity list into two groups, the predefined XML set and all the rest. I found converting the core XML entities can come in handy.
- I made the entity list selectable so now you can check the entities you would like to convert
- Added some toggle controls for each group so its easy to select or deselect them all.
Note: Conversion starts to get a little bit dicey at super high code points. Starting at about 900+, unless the character is listed in the selection table on the right it will automatically be translated to its numbered entity. I’m working on it.
This one caught me off guard. After upgrading from Prototype 1.6 RC0 straight to the final release I found that all my custom JavaScript code simply lay there dormant. Fighting off panic I did some quick googling and ran across this post detailing how custom events are now namespaced. Hopefully this post helps others out there who find themselves in the same situation.
//Wrong
document.observe("contentloaded", function () {...});
//Right
document.observe("dom:loaded", function () {...}); |
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