Smashed Apples by Brian Holmes

Google App Engine opens it's doors, shows cover charge

 

Google App Engine is now open to all developers. That’s really good news for those that didn’t get in to the beta program. But the bigger news is that they’ve offered up estimated costs. It’s going to be free to get started ( take notice Amazon ) but the expected pricing will be  

• $0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour
• $0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage
• $0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth
• $0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth

That’s after you have run through your 500 MB of storage and 5M pageviews / month.  They seem like pretty reasonable rates. As always Google does it bigger and for cheaper.

There’s also two new apis being being opened up: image api and the google memcache api.

 

Fun.

Tags: Google+App+Engine, Cloud+Services

The Smashed Apples Open Source Development Platform

The Smashed Apples Development Platform is an open source development platform that aims to help flex developers easily and quickly develop flex applications on cloud services, like Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, the Google Web Api’s.

Many Clouds, 1 App.

Flex is perfect for leveraging cloud services. It was designed to have multiple sources of data. Your data can be in an xml file, a web service, or come from remoting directly into backend code. You can use Google App Engine to host your database, store your images in Amazon S3 and deploy the messaging through BlazeDS running on an Ec2 instance.

Why not all, and more.

 

V 099 Beta

We’re still currently in version 099 beta. But we decided to go ahead and solicit help and feedback from the flex community. We have ideas about what other flex developers might want, but it’ll be better if you just tell us.

More than a swc

Smashed Apples is more than a swc. It’s a development platform. The SmashedApplesSDK is just one piece of a much bigger puzzle. For example on Amazon we created a public Amazon Ec2 ami  ( ami-5640a53f -) that starts up an apache web server that deploys blazeDS and a java project that allows you to access the Amazon SimpleDB from within flex. The swc just ties it all together from within flex. Also, with that image you can open up messaging ports and do push pulls off of Amazon Web Services.

Besides being a swc to leverage cloud services, I’ve also been incorporating enterprise-level dynamic flex computing components that will help you create flex apps faster. Forms that know how to submit themselves. DataQuery objects that allow you to consistently create dynamic queries on backend resources.

Harnessing Cloud Services as Needed

Last August at Flex 360 Seattle I had the simple idea of using flex with Amazon Web Services to build a photo viewer using Amazon S3. The problem was I knew nothing about using Amazon Web Services. I wasn’t a linux administrator and every time I tried to use Amazon Web Services from within flex I just got frustrated. (What’s up with that freaking SSH KeyPair!!) I mentioned it to long time friend Jeremy Mooer and it turns out he knew everything about using linux on amazon web services that I didn’t. That simple idea turned into a full blown open source project. As I started looking into Cloud Services, I found there were alot more out there than I suspected. Jeremy Got busy creating Ec2 ami’s and I went about creating the flex sdk, and the smashed apples java ec2 java api. BlazeDS went Open Source, Google came out with AppEngine and it became very apparent to me that the applications of tomorrow are going to be built off of cloud services. ( Get ready to dump your RDBMS btw ). Businesses are going to create thier own mini cloud services. Relational Database Management Systems are going to give way to Object Persistent Systems. Words like Hadoop, MapReduce, Erlang and Mnesia are going to be found on more and more resumes. Smashed Apples has turned into my goto for being able to harness cloud services from within flex applications. Pay for what you use, right?

 

 

Future Development

We’ve already been looking into ways to incorporate Google App Engine, and more code will be coming soon. 

But in the future, we’d also like to support:

• Provide flex Api’s for the Google Web Api’s
• Provide flex Api’s for Facebook, MySpace
• Cloud Providers : IBM Blue Cloud, Joyent, GoGrid, SunGrid,
• Integration as a Service: Boomi, Mule OnDemand, OpSource Connect (OSB), Amazon SQS, Microsoft BizTalk Services
• Content as a Service: SpringCM, Xythos OnDemand, GoogleBase
• BPM and Workflow: ProcessMaker, Appian Anywhere, Skemma, Intensil
• Platform as a Service: Bungee Labs Connect, Etelos, Intiuit Quickbase, LongJump, Apprenda SaasGrid, Oracle Saas Platform 
• Cloud Deployment: rPath, CohesiveFT, VMWare, Xen, Parallels, Bea Weblogic Server VE, 3Tera AppLogic, Elastra Cloud Server
• Billing, Contract Management: OpSource/LeCayla, Aria, eVapt, Amazon DevPay, Zuora
• Security: OpenID, OAuth, Ping Identity
• Data: Amazon S3, Box.net, Google Base, Amazon SimpleDB, Trackvia, Microsoft SSDS.

 

Learn More

Site: http://www.smashedapples.com/

Code: http://smashedapples.googlecode.com/

 User Group: http://groups.google.com/group/smashedapples

Simple Explorer: http://www.smashedapples.com/samples/explorer/SmashedExplorerApp.html

It currently runs off of the public smashed apples ami, it use blazeds for remoting, to the smashed apples java api that stores data in SimpleDB.

Help is Welcome

We are an open source project! If you’re a flex developer with some free time and would like to get involved please email me. There’s plenty to do. We’re easy to get along with, like to joke around and doing an open source project is a great way to get your name out there. We give credit where credit is due. 

Corporate Sponsors

Finding corporate sponsors has not been our goal when we created this project. That being said, I have received several inquiries about whether or not we have corporate sponsors for the project and we are open to the idea of having a corporate sponsor(s). If you would like to become a corporate sponsor please contact me.

 

 

 

Tags: smashed+apples, cloud+services

3D Searching via Flex

I came across a few search engines that have deployed flex interfaces. You can find them searchme and brynsbrain.   Looks like searchme is using Doug McCune’s CoverFlow component. Is that verifiable? I really like the idea of using a flex interface to improve searching results. I guess it’s time to start looking into the google search api.

 

Tags: search, google+search+api

PyAMF 0.3 released

The guys at PyAMF released version 0.3. It fixes some of the hacks i hacked out to get up and running with Google App Engine. You can read more about it over at their blog. Also, here’s their tutorial for getting  setup.

Tags: PyAMF, Google+App+Engine, Cloud+Services

The Cloud Moves Fast

Hope you didn’t blink when Google released App Engine. You might’ve missed that they just released version 1.0.1. You can get the new download at the google code page. Looks like (at least on windows) you have to uninstall the previous version.

The few issues fixed can be found here and here.

It’s good to know that the code base is actively being developed. Also, it’s encouraging developers to get involved with the project. Us developers really don’t have much of an excuse anymore. If you want to get your bugs fixed you better create an issue and star it.

 

 

Tags: Google+App+Engine

10k more AppEngine beta accounts available and more Language Support

Pete Koomen, Product manager for Google App Engine has announced 10k more beta accounts. He also announced support for more languages, offline processing and support for large files. I wonder what languages will be supported next.

 

 

Help! What to do without a Google AppEngine Account

This topic came up in the normal course of conversation. Here’s the answer. Which translated means “No Excuses: Develop your App”. Check it out. While you’re at it, here’s a post from two weeks ago to put the Google App Engine in context. And here’s a post about the rumored cost of google app engine from Dave Winer. The money quote is:

How much would it be worth to buy companies without having to transition their technology to their platform? There would be no retraining either, all the programmers in the companies they acquire would know how to work in the environment.

 

Well, we know now it is free. It would be beneficial for Google to buy a startup off of thier cloud. I can’t imagine YouTube being built off Google though. I think it has more to do with people using Google services and Google allowing for AdSense integration. Also, in my own opinion, WEB 2.0 is about to take over the business world. I can think of alot of apps for small businesses that would be very beneficial of being on the cloud. 

 

 

 

 

Tags: SDK, Google+App+Engine, Cloud+Services

Debugging Google AppEngine with PyDev in Eclipse

This assumes you have Google AppEngine, Eclipse & PyDev installed.

I’m gonna have to go back a bit on what I said about creating a python project in this previous post. Instead of creating individual projects for each app you intend to create, I found it much easier to create one project that encompassed my entire development directory. Also, I received a few emails on how I was adding PyAMF and the google sdk to get code completion support. > Prefs

I added the .egg file for PyAMF and I zipped up the google folder underneath my appengine installation and added it.

 

Now onto debugging.

1. Create a new PyDev Project. Right click the project folder and Add New Folder. Click Advanced, Check the Link to folder and point it to the your appengine installation directory. Essentially your entire AppEngine Directory.

 

My project now looks like this

 

2. Now I open the project I want to debug and place my breakpoints.

 

3. Now right click on the dev_appserver.py file  and go to Debug As > Open Debug Dialog. 

Right Click Python Run and choose New. 

Name the configuration

Select your Project

Add the dev_appserver.py as the Main Module

 

Then switch to the Arguments tab and enter the project you want to debug for the program arguments. You can also enter the —port=8080 switch here just like the command prompt.

 

Finally, Click Apply Then debug. You should see the following the Console:

 

Run your  app. From Flex or from the Browser you should be able to hit your break points. Oh and I don’t recommend doing this to your arm or back. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tags: PyDev, python, eclipse, debugging, AppEngine, PyAMF

Getting Started on Google App Engine with Flex and PyAMF (2)

UPDATE: For setting up PyAMF I recommend using this article written over on PyAMF. This original post was written before a patch was created. And there instructions will be more up to date and maintained.

 

The previous article on this topic can be found here.

I’m also shamelessy pulling from this article. It almost got me there, but there was one thing noted below that I needed to do. 

1. Download pyamf.

2. Now unzip the pyamf into a directory ( i went with c:/pyamf ) and browse to it from the command prompt. When you get to the source folder run “ez_setup.py”.

3. Now complete the following steps ( original reference can be found here )

• Download and unpack pyAMF-0.2
• Download fpconst and put it in pyAMF-0.2/pyamf
• Delete the file pyAMF-0.2/pyamf/adapters/__init__.py
• Comment out the line register_adapters(); at the end of pyAMF-0.2/pyamf/__init__.py

 (I did these steps and found I still needed to comment out line 26 in the pyAMF-0.2/pyamf/__init__.py that looks like:  from pyamf.adapters import register_adapters )

4. After that is completed, go back to your command prompt and run “setup.py install”

5. Afterwards in the directory where you downloaded pyamf you should have a directory that has a dist directory under that. Add the .egg in the dist directory to your System – PYTHONPATH. in windows > prefs > PyDev > Interepretor just like we did for the google.zip file above. ( This will bring in code completion support )

6. From the command prompt start your server   /appengine/dev_appserver.py {app name}

7. Browse to http://localhost:8080/

if everything’s set up and running properly you’ll see something like

400 Bad Request

To access this PyAMF gateway you must use POST requests (GET received)

 

 

8. Finally, create a flex app.  Below is the code I used. You should be able to drop it in your flex app file. If everything works you can use the appcfg.py commands to upload your application and point your endpoint to your new application url.  

 

This is by no means complete and I hope to get more examples up and running soon. If you have any questions feel free to comment or email me. I’ll be posting on how to debug python apps from eclipse when making calls from flex and also some other topics that have been floating around. Like Google Authentication.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tags: PyAMF, Google+AppEngine, FLex, Python, Eclipse, PyDEV, Cloud+Services

Getting Started on Google App Engine with Flex and PyAMF (1)

So this is my first of hopefully two posts on getting setup to work on Google App Engine. This will get your python and local google server up and running

1. Download and install python if you need to.

2. Download and install the google app engine sdk. I recommend installing this somewhere on your system that is easily accessible. By default on windows it went under /program files/google/appengine. I reinstalled it under c:/appengine/ for easy access from the command prompt. Do as you will but remember where it gets put.

3. Install pydev into your eclipse. There’s a great getting started guide for pydev located here. It explains how to set your python interpreter up.  

To add code complete support for the google sdk in eclipse first zip up the google directory in your appengine installation directory. Then go to windows > prefs > PyDev > Interpretor : System PYTHONPATH click “New Egg/Zip” and add that google.zip

UPDATE: The crossed out steps are better explained by this post  about getting your debugger up and running in eclipse.

4. Create a new PyDev project. Finish. 

5. Now browse to your appengine installation directory and copy / paste the new_project_template into the same directory. Then rename it to the name of  your project.

6. And now back in eclipse right click on the src folder and do a add new folder > advanced > Link to the file system and browse to the project folder under your appengine installation.

7. Open app.yaml on the top line change the application: new-project-template to application : your-app-name

 

Now open a command prompt and go to your appengine isntallation directory and type dev_appserver.py —port=9999 {YOUR APP FOLDER NAME}

Then open a browser and go to http://localhost:9999/ and you should see it running.

 

Installing PyAMF and Setting up flex environment next.

 

 

 

 

Tags: pydev, cloud, google+appengine, flex