While many would argue that Google’s recent issue with accidentally collecting wifi packet data from public broadcasting networks will have minimal impact to developers, I disagree.
Having just left a corporate environment in which I would occasionally get to chat with the CIO regarding the pros and cons of some current technology trends, such as cloud computing, which would also include discussions around the enterprise suitability of those solutions, I can tell you – accidents like this are going to have an impact.
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posted on the May 20th, 2010 No Comments »
It was great to discover the improvements to the Top Search Queries in Google’s Webmaster Tools amidst my frustration with Google AppEngine yesterday (yes unrelated I know). The changes really put data right in front of your face that even an SEO hack like me can understand and do something with.
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posted on the April 21st, 2010 1 Comment »
With last week’s release of Sidewiki, there have been a quite a few discussions around whether it is a good or bad thing for blogs and sites in general. Whether it is the right way to go about implementing a global commenting system, etc, etc.
Whether it is or isn’t doesn’t really worry too much – my thoughts are around what can be done with the API.
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posted on the September 28th, 2009 No Comments »
Google’s App Engine has some scheduled maintenance pretty soon (June 10th (Wednesday) at 4 PM Pacific Time). During this time, both datastore writes and the memcache will be disabled. Now, I have no problem with this – all systems need to have maintenance completed on them, and in general some of this maintenance will involve service disruption.
What I do have a problem with is the suggested way of dealing with the outage. In the scheduled maintenance announcement instructions are given on how a CapabilityDisabledError exception can be intercepted and gracefully dealt with (example code from the announcement below):
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posted on the June 10th, 2009 1 Comment »
I am beginning to get some laughs out of the raft of tweets about “Google Wave is like product x, combined with product y (with a bit of product z thrown in)”. It’s only natural that people try to liken it to other things they have seen (and I know I’m doing the same thing). I think the reality is that it’s actually quite a bit different from anything we have seen before (like the afore mentioned radioactive dancing squirrel for instance).
As Google convey in their presentation they started by asking the question: “What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?” Read the rest of this entry »
posted on the June 1st, 2009 2 Comments »
Recently I logged into the Google AppEngine dashboard, and was pleased to be greeted with the option to take an “early look” at their Java support. Nice, I thought. Java on AppEngine – that’ll be pretty handy. Didn’t think too much more about it. Then today in my normal web reading time I came across a post on SpringSource about How to write your Google AppEngine applications in Groovy. Now *this* was interesting. Groovy is a language that has caught my attention on more than one occasion, and has actually proved pretty useful for writing small utility applications.
Using Groovy for Web Application Development
Groovy is well suited to the domain of the web programmer. Being fairly impatient types, who would like to produce applications quickly and would rather not write more code than we have to, Groovy is an absolute diamond in the J2EE coal mine. Groovy offers groovlets in the place of servlets, which essentially do the same thing; but some of the syntactic sugar offered with groovy builders make generating HTML pretty simple.
The quest for Grails
As it stands, groovy is pretty useful for building simple scripts, but of course it’s not going to compete with the popular frameworks out there at the moment. Well along comes Grails. I came across Grails a little while ago, but have to admit passed it off as “just another Ruby on Rails clone”, and without being too harsh, it more or less is (with some minor differences). Without having committed myself one way or the other (a bit of a jack of all trades and master of none, perhaps) I could have gone for either RAILS or Grails without caring too much.
The potential (and likelihood according to SpringSource) that GAE will eventually work with Grails applications, really tips the balance for me. GAE hosting is probably some of the most economical and easy to manage scalable hosting environments currently available. With a framework as powerful as Grails deployed on it, I would expect more developers showing an interest in, and migrating to both Grails and Groovy. This in turn, would probably encourage more developers to use AppEngine to deploy their applications.
A note about CRON
Additionally, I noticed today that there is a menu item for Cron Jobs now in the AppEngine management interface. Anyone know when that popped in there? Was it at the same time that they implemented the Java support? At any rate, I’m pretty excited about it – previously I was thinking I would have to run an EC2 instance or something to handle background tasks required by my web applications. Now I don’t think I will have to 
posted on the April 9th, 2009 3 Comments »
In my opinion Google’s AppEngine is a application prototypers dream. Up until just now I was tossing up whether to code a prototype or ConceptBuzz in PHP or RoR, even though I had a predisposition to building components of it using python. This was purely for the reason that I was being conservative with regards to economics – it’s cheap to get PHP hosting (and in general if you have cpanel hosting, you get RoR as well) so I was leaning that way.
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posted on the March 20th, 2009 2 Comments »
