I’ve got so many personal projects at the moment, I’m a little bit overloaded. It’s time to commit and follow through. Late last night I committed to doing two things. Firstly, get one project off the ground and secondly to blog about it. More about the project in the next few posts and probably more importantly, why I’ve decided to give Google App Engine one last go. I still have a number of apps running on Google App Engine and they continue to tick over, but it’s time to do a full run down of the benefits and costs. This project is going to help me do that and hopefully provide some valuable feedback to the wider Google App Engine developer community. The project will touch on most of the GAE API (Java only I’m afraid) and will integrate with a number of external services, including Facebook and Paypal. It’s time for me to find out if GAE has legs.
are all of your projects freelance?
Hi Gregory, thanks for taking the time to comment. A slightly left of field question, but the straight answer is yes … and no. I run my own freelance business and although I still do pure development work, my main income is generated from consultancy. In my consultancy work it is important that I keep up to date with technologies and trends. That’s why I still take on development jobs and work on my own projects, as it keeps my skills sharp and shiny. I pretty sure that doesn’t answer your question, as I’m unsure as to where you’re coming from.
Hi, I really look forward for the blogs regarding the GAE project.
I’m overloaded by personal projects as well and I’ve also commited to finish something soon – so now I work on GAE + Android simple app for internet/data stats (I would like to use those data for comparing different providers, sharing experience between users and so on) – basically a tool which should help users to choose/switch their internet provider depending on other users experience/geo availability and similar stuff.
I’m really interested what framework are you going to use – I’m into Spring but it really sucks in GAE as the load time/cold start gets over 50+ seconds (Spring + MVC + Objectify + Velocity) – and I’ve tried a lot of different optimizations (jar compressing, precompiling and so so). The same applies for Android, I’ve tried Roboguice and the library itself is over 500+KB and I really hate tighl coupling through extending of Android classes and Anotations for almost anything I want to do.
So as the result I started to work on simple/basic Spring subset of classes for DI (I’ve actually forked tiny-spring project and I try to talk with the original developer to merge/join our efforts but its not quite successful so I would probably need to keep my fork or renamed or something) and for Android I made simple DI Spring based module which does View/Layour/Bean injections and use standard Spring XML configuration.
Anyway, good luck with your project and as I said – I really look forward to blogs about it!
Hi Tomas, thanks for stopping by. As you will have seen from my previous posts, I have only recently found Stripes framework and will be using it for the time being. I’ve used GWT, Struts and Spring and to be honest I’ve never been that comfortable with them.
I don’t want to start any type of “religious” framework war, so let me just say that they don’t fit my style. I’m all for tools to cut down on repetitive tasks and improve the quality of what we produce, but I’m not that convinced of the return on investment in some cases.
I like Stripes because it does most of the heavy lifting that I need, but no more. Of course there is more that it could do, but I’m happy to live without it. As it stands it does what I need and then stays out of my way. I haven’t had any issues with it on app engine, but I’ll be looking at that in future blogs.
Again, thanks for taking the time to comment, and I hope you enjoy the project as it develops.