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

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

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

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

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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Python, Threads and the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL)

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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