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App Engine Boilerplate 2.0 – Using html5-boilerplate v2 on Google App Engine

12. August 2011

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Just a year ago Paul Irish and several contributors started working on html5-boilerplate, a popular repository of boilerplate and best practices for creating cross-browser compatible, html5-enabled websites. Thanks to the efforts of many front-end developers and researchers who have spent countless hours on developing and evolving best practices, html5 boilerplate is rapidly maturing and establishing [...]

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App Engine Boilerplate

5. April 2011

9 Comments

I recently started appengine-boilerplate, a repository of often used boilerplate code for Google’s App Engine, which allows to quickly setup new projects without having to re-invent the most common wheels. All code is released under the BSD license, and It comes with the following goodies: html5-boilerplate (incl. jQuery) OpenID authentication User preferences data model (with [...]

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Scaling Python Servers with Worker Processes and Socket Duplication

29. January 2011

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Developing servers that scale is usually quite tricky, even more so with Python and the absence of worker threads which can run on multiple cpu cores [1]. A possible solution are worker processes that duplicate the client’s socket, a technique that allows the workers to processes requests and send responses directly to the client socket. [...]

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Unicode and UTF Overview

27. December 2010

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This post is a brief technival overview of Unicode, a widely used standard for multilingual character representation, and the family of UTF-x encoding algorithms. First a brief introduction to Unicode: Unicode is intended to address the need for a workable, reliable world text encoding. Unicode could be roughly described as “wide-body ASCII” that has been [...]

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Advice for Android Developers: Prepare for App Acquisition

17. December 2010

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Here’s a brief but important advice for Android app developers: starting with your first app, prepare for the situation where a company wants to acquire one of your applications. Use a unique signing key (alias) for each app! Else you’ll be forced to either cancel the acquisition or hand out the key you use for [...]

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Amazon Releases Open Source Android and iPhone SDK for S3, SimpleDB, SQS and SNS

9. December 2010

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Amazon has just released an open source (Apache 2.0 licensed) SDK for Android and iPhone which greatly simplifies using S3, SimpleDB, Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Simple Notification Service (SNS). A mobile application has two basic approaches for interacting with Amazon’s Web Services: Proxying requests through a server Making the requests directly from the mobile [...]

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How to Setup Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) in Eclipse, including the Galaxy Tab SDK

6. December 2010

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Today Android version 2.3 (Gingerbread, API Level 9) was released, including an updated Android plugin for Eclipse and the API Level 9 SDK. The release includes some very welcome updates for both users and developers, including better text selection tools, access to more sensor data, improved garbage collection, updated video drivers for better OpenGL performance, [...]

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Python, Threads and the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL)

13. October 2010

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Threads Threads make it possible to execute multiple pieces of code in parallel, which means either utilizing multiple processors or having the operating system schedule execution time for the threads sequentially on one processor. In contrast to multiprocessing (forking) where multiple separated processes are started, all threads run in a single process and have access [...]

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History of What.CD’s Bittorrent Tracker Software

13. October 2010

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An interesting post about the private torrent tracker what.cd surfaced on HN today, portraying the attempts and final success of creating a highly scalable torrent tracker software. It’s an interesting read in particular because of the honesty of their development process and the description of multiple attempts to write a tracker from scratch in C. [...]

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