Links : HTML5 Boiler Plate for Google AppEngine Projects

While searching for something on Github, I stumbled upon a pretty comprehensive HTML5 Boiler Plate for Google AppEngine Projects. Looks great to use as the default Google App Engine project template.

App Engine Boilerplate is a versatile yet minimalistic setup for new App Engine projects.

• html5-boilerplate 2.0
 (including it's automated build toolchain for minification and concatenation of js+css)

• Beautiful OpenID login with openid-selector

• Memcaching setup for requests and responses

• Flexible user-preferences model (with Gravatar link)

• Templates and template addons

• Tools such as is_testenv() and slugify(url)

• app.yaml
 configuration for admin areas, static files

• Released under the BSD license

The source is available on Github. Will be using it in an App Engine project that will be kicked off towards the middle of the week and will share more about it.

Web Page Test Results for INSPIONS.com

Curious with the announcement of Google’s page speed service, We ran the Web Page Test on http://www.inspions.com.  It appears, little surprisingly,  if we follow ‘thumb rules’ of optimization for web pages, the optimized site may actually run slower than the current version.

The page load time is actually worse on the optimized version of the site.  You may check full results of the test here. I will take a look at detailed analysis and post notes later on what is good and bad about the current site structure.

Getting Started With Google App Engine on Windows

If you are planning to get started with Google App Engine on Windows, this note that I have written last year may help. 

I will be using Python for my development, so will be installing App Engine environment for Python.

Python

• Install Python 2.6.4 version from http://www.python.org/download/ I was little tempted to have the latest version 3.1.1 but read in the release notes that 3.1.1 by design is NOT backward compatible. So it may not work with Google App Engine. So just stick to 2.6.4
• Install PIL Module required for Image manipulation on Google App Engine.

Google App Engine SDK for Python

Install Google App Engine SDK from Google App Engine Downloads page. Latest version at this time is 1.3.0 released on 12/14/2009. 

Update:  Latest version of Python is 2.7.1 and App Engine SDK on Python as of 13 January 2011 is 1.4.1

This is all we need to start over working on Google App Engine. We can use Google App Engine Launcher to create a new app, run the app or even deploy the app to Google App Engine.  We can just use the IDLE editor that comes with Python installation to view and edit Python files.

It may just take about 10 minutes for both of these installations.

If you are really serious about developing apps on Google App Engine, then it may be helpful to use an IDE and some source code repository. So keep going : 

• Tortoise  is a nice Subversion client for Windows and you can download it from http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads.
• If you don’t have a SVN or other repository, try unfuddle. Its really great and Free.
• Of the available IDEs, I really liked Aptana Studio.  You can get it here: Aptana Studio . Once studio is installed, get PyDev plugin from Plugins tab on the studio.

It may take about another 10 more minutes to install Tortoise, Aptana and setup SVN repository. 

Hope that helps.

Velocity 2010: Urs Holzle : How fast Web Can be ?

Just watched Velocity 2010: Urs Holzle on Active Player. It is surprising to see that the average load time of a web page is 4.9 seconds.

Urs Holzle (Google)

Source : Velocity 2010: Urs Holzle from O'Reilly Velocity Conference ( Feed ) via Active Player

Quote : Internet is a medium based on interruption

Google may be helping us to find content faster and better. But Google is definitely changing the way we learn, think, organize and work.

Internet is a medium based on interruption — and it's changing the way people read and process information. We've come to associate the acquisition of wisdom with deep reading and solitary concentration, and there's not much of that to be found online.

-- Nicholas Carr

( Read/Listen to NPR Interview with Nicholas Carr here  Or Download MP3 )

You can read the first article that voiced the concern and later grew to a book called “The Shallows” here: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”.

The Productivity Paradox

Little experiment that is worth trying, if you haven’t yet : Try blocking access to Internet for your Software development team and see how it would impact the overall productivity and quality of the team.

Trends : C# or VB.NET

There is a heated discussion going on at LinkedIn in .NET People's group about what is the most preferred .NET Programming Language : VB or C#.  I don't want to add fuel to the fire, but just wanted to point out search patterns for C# and VB.NET on Google. As usual, interpretation is left to you.