google app engine

Cloud computing seems to be the latest buzz word in internet technologies at the moment so I have decided to dip my toes in by trying Google App Engine.

First, its free. Well so long as you don’t need more than the free quota limits provided. But even then the rates don’t seem too bad. However, I have never measured CPU-Hours in any previous app so I don’t really know what’s a lot and what isn’t.

Second, its Google. And, up to now, anything Google that I have put my mind to seems to have worked out ok. it also means you can draw on existing Google technologies and incorporate them into your cloud app.

Third, its new. What I mean is, its something new for me to learn. Currently, App Engine only runs in two flavours, Python and Java, neither of which I am fluent in. Now I started the App Engine tutorial in Java but I just couldn’t get my head around the syntax so I have switched to Python and I am surprised at how quickly I am learning. I feel I am nearly ready to start writing apps in it. plus there is the DataStore which stores objects, not rows. That should be interesting to get my noggin around.

So now I just need an idea, that ‘killer’ app that I can start on. Cloud Computing seems to be bias towards data/network intensive activity rather than SEO based sites so perhaps an online game or similar would be it. Any ideas?

travian

well, even us techies like to play. i have started playing travian, an online strategy game like Risk but on steroids.

What i like is that it is just based on numbers and time. no fancy graphics or complex key commands to learn - just point and click to set things going then come back an hour later to see whats happened.

Its free (but you can pay for enhanced features) and you can register on more than 1 server at once.

i will blog my progress as i go on but there is so much to learn

school website

i have been asked to pick up another website based in Oldham

it is http://www.saddleworthpreparatoryschool.org.uk/ which was given to me in the form of a .shtml website. I have never seen one of these before but it simply allows static pages to have common parts stored in 1 file so there is no duplication.

While analysing the stats i notice it does quite well for target visitors but further investigation into the html is worrying. The site has been copied from another totally unrelated to schools but some of the previous meta has been left in so there are references to web hosting and so on.

Also, i have never seen a website with the closing /head and opening body missing either but there you are.

The owner wants more interaction on the site so i am proposing php/smarty to do this along with a control panel to manage it.

fasthosts misery

Is it just me or are fasthosts dedicated servers possessed?

I can’t believe I have just spent £1,000 for a dedicated server only to have 1 problem after another. Starting with journal issues (whatever they are) things have just gone worse and worse.

What really bugged me was that they accused me of corrupting the journal! From their stock server, I installed php 5.2.6 using YUM, and that was it. I ran some command-line php scripts that accessed the mysql db and wrote html files and now i have some serious problems with it.

Anyway I have jacked them off - i cant offer their services to my customers at this rate. I think i will go back to Apples (i cant afford an xserve so i think i’ll try a mac mini) as they have been very reliable for me in the past.

please let me know if you have had any similar (or opposite) experiences with fasthosts.

football live streaming site

i was recently commissioned to develop a website that served live streaming video to paying subscribers

It doesn’t officially launch until Dec 25th, just in time for the Boxing Day football matches. Part of the challenge with this site was to prevent the same user logging in twice to view a stream, as if they sent their mates the login details to get a free match. I used quite an extensive class to get around this and to put hard limits in place so as not to overload the server. If you want to find it do a google search for “442tv” (clients request to remain anonymous)

iknow uk

About the time I learnt ColdFusion, I helped set up the data aspect of iknow-UK Ltd. Just prior to this, I helped the iknow guys create a prototype site using CF. It soon became apparant that ColdFusion running as a script in a browser window was not going to be scalable enough. So we decided to buy our own server, an X-Serve, which didn’t support CF. But that didn’t matter because I was already learning PHP to use as a command-line script to build all those pages (about 25,000 to start with every night). From there I haven’t looked back although I still do miss CF a little.

ColdFusion

By now I had a dedicated server that happened to come with ColdFusion server. So I got curious.I quickly understood how writing templates could be done quite easily in ColdFusion and, after learning CFSCRIPT, I was away writing CF websites and loving it. Whereas ASP required ASP code within the HTML, CF had abbreviated HTML tags that were so much better to use. Not too disimilar to the Smarty template system that I use now. More on that later.

Given an opportunity, I would love to go back to ColdFusion.