image courtesy johnson7
App Engine is generally a new paradigm for webapp developers; replacing sessions with memcache and a schemaless datastore just two elements requiring new thinking for old problems. Unfortunately there are a few more hidden nuisances which have the potential to waste programming time relatively early on. Here’s four of my personal head-bangers:
1. the datastore doesn’t always store Properties
I’ve had trouble with it refusing to store arbitrary entity props unless I assign them in the entity constructor itself (these fields were optional btw). Just setting prop values after initialisation then put() on the ds didn’t write them.
Continue reading ‘Google App Engine Datastore Gotchas’
Published at 9 November 2009
in Google and web.
I posted about Google’s inhouse deadpool a couple of weeks back. Strangely though although I use one of the wordpress sitemap plugins to update mine accordingly Google stubbornly refused to index it. The reason?
Google appears not to add pages that include the rel=”nofollow” meta attribute by default.
Continue reading ‘Nofollow Stops Google Indexing Your Site’
Published at 28 October 2009
in Google and web.
Mobile, Music, Real-time and er, that watery thing – make no mistake about it, Google is the new borg. But they don’t always succeed. Like the finely tuned crack team of elite geeks they are, they bury their mistakes. For this piece I’ve taken on the role of chronological gravedigger (well it’ll fill my CV out won’t it?) and scooped out the bodies; not pretty viewing:
Dodgeball
This is what happens when the big G ventures outside of it’s tech stronghold: Tech invents something better and Google is left wondering why it got itself into some arcane mysticism it never really understood in the first place. Dodgeball, social networking on mobile before smartphone-based GPS services went nuclear – it even used SMS. Bless.
Google Answers
Two for the price of one here, as Google Q&A was a forerunner to Answers, and whose comedy value is far more interesting. Not today’s Q&A app that very few of you may be aware of, but an old web0.1 version whereby users emailed Googlers who responded for a fee, presumably with some answers. We never found out for sure though, as the service only lasted 24 hours. Nothing like fail fast, fail often eh Google?
Continue reading ‘The Google Deadpool’
Making a bit of a splash (no more I swear) online, Google Wave has been trumpeted as the replacement of ’60s’ email and IM applications. It’s also got friends in high places at Google Towers.
This could be a turning point on the web.Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering VP
On seeing a screenshot my first thought was ‘Facebook news feed’.
It’s got a similar albeit primitive system of inline comment right now. While it’s a nice to have, it’s not ‘killer’ and some of the Wave features (every character typed is spewed out in realtime as if participants were viewing the same terminal) will turn a lot of people off straight away. Indeed I’ve a few ideas of my own regarding ‘next generation’ communication, and they don’t involve greater intrusion. While the inline editing is a good thing I don’t regard it as a big enough win to justify moving onto a new platform, cloud or no cloud. What would be wrong with sticking this kind of functionality into Google Docs? We need smarter comms not more of them.
First quality flame post appears to be at Gigaom…
TechCrunch recently covered the phenomenol rise of FB photos over existing well established image stores such as Flickr. First mover advantage was always a big draw in the first dot com rush, yet the debate around FMA and what is termed ‘fast second‘ is a mature one in other industries. Size versus speed. I wonder is the web conforming to a more balanced ratio in this regard? A look around gives mixed signals -
- Twitter One of the hottest web properties today. A resounding success thanks to FMA. Just don’t mention the business plan.
- Friendster Big in the Asia-Pacific region (I’m not sure if that’s the web equivalent of stating a musician is “big in Germany”) but has fallen behind FB & MySpace in Western online society. Imo FB’s rep for being a college student’s thing got it viralling and the API sealed it’s dominance in the long term.
- iPhone App Store Certainly got developers excited, but then wouldn’t the devs who like to be known as creatives already have iPhones in the first place? The proliferation of announced app stores for the various mobile platforms since merely means the commoditisation of the idea and another wall around each silo. First mover advantage will mean little in this regard.
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Amazon went at it full pelt – access to root, command line, the whole server OS. A brave move. Second out of the blocks was Google’s App Engine, offering a much more restricted/simplified Python-based service depending on how you look at things. Crucially though it allows devs to play for free – that together with the “it’s Google” factor give it a much greater monthly pageview traffic than EC2’s homepage. But it’s cpu cycles that measure the success here and EC2 already bears the hallmarks of an enterprise-ready app in a production environment with a standard SLA in place. Too early to call then, but investors have been asking for more visibility on Amazon Web Services in general, so definitely a future battleground.
Has first mover advantage disappeared then from the web? Although many breakthrough applications have been superceded by bigger and better alternatives with a far greater leverage, none are by any means rendered dead in the water because of it. And neither are the fast seconds always some massive corporation throwing money at the latest buzzwords; Zooomr established itself by providing a slightly more interactive interface for what is in effect an online storage bucket. So I guess the answer is “it depends”.
So after killing my runaway IE processes for the nth time yesterday I decided to download Google Chrome. I was extremely sceptical of their ‘faster browsing’ claim, believing it would amount to illusions similar to their tricks in Gmail – actioning requests onmousedown, etc.
I was wrong.
24 hours into my first Chrome session it still only uses up 50meg of memory – and stayed at ~20 yesterday for most of the day. It refused to choke in an IE-like manner over sites like Ebay, YouTube & Gmail. Flash videos loaded up closer to my PS3 browsers speed (i.e. like something approaching acceptable performance), and as I say, no memory leak. Internet Explorer would have hogged anything up to 600meg of space by now, thus requiring me to save all my current tabs on notepad/to memory kill it then start the shoddy thing up again.
Granted Gmail and other javascript-heavy sites did not seem to run any faster. But they didn’t stall either. It doesn’t come with Java support built in, but I don’t think I’ll risk adding it on – Chrome is my new speedy browsing experience from now on. Firefox still gets the heavy-lifting vote due to the overwhelming array of plugins I’ve slapped onto it.I’ve been critical in the past towards Google and their useless feature-bloat, particularly in Gmail’s case. But with Chrome they seem to have done good.
Update: Too much hope I guess. No sooner had I posted this than I found a bug. Over and above the annoying textbox glitch that seems to be posing quite a problem. It’s treatment of textbox input is faulty when it sends to the server – It removes newline formatting in Wordpress 2.2.1. Thus my blog post came out as one long blurb. Bug report submitted.
‘Portals’ as they were have died: iGoogle & Facebook have placed faith in the tab. More than merely a user-experience metaphor, the tab allows apps to take back the browser from the platform, and in doing so affords the user a higher performance, leaving behind all those clunky multi-layered flash/js/iframe flashing lights, a la MySpace.
Except that Facebook’s performance seems to have gotten worse since it’s renovations. The umpteen ajax updaters located at various points around the page seem to wind the browser response down to a gradual, slow, painful death. Adding that to Gmail and Ebay in the list of pre-Alpha sites intent on destroying my browser window.
And I’m also adding a 2nd Adobe ‘platform’ to the blacklist of general technological cancers killing off the interwebs. Yes that’s right Acrobat Reader, global standard for electronic document stalling.
And Google now have the temerity to add a link to Gmail claiming to speed up the browser!
Browsers are getting faster and better at running web applications like Google Mail that use browser technology to its limits. In order to get the best experience possible and make Google Mail run an average of twice as fast, we suggest that you upgrade your browser to one of the fastest Google Mail supported browsers that work on Windows.
Automated Google PR Generator
Published at 12 November 2008
in Google and web.
I use Gmail for email. I use Google Talk to chat. Now I am being forced to use Gmail to place a video call.
Perhaps I had better switch from Google Talk to Skype…
Let me explain my reasoning, I use Gmail currently with chat disabled. This improves my browsing performance especially when I have multiple tabs open. The web’s performance these days is bad enough with the proliferation of enormously cpu-intensive and memory leaking flash sites. I cannot run two youtube.com tabs simultaneously without my browser having a heart attack. Until developers like those in charge of Gmail realise the web part of the internet is not for bloated (and highly questionable in terms of usefulness) webapps, my user experience of this part of the net is no longer as smooth and productive as it used to be. And others like me.
And just after posting how much better web based email is compared with SMTP clients too, sigh…
I *love* not having to delete emails. Scanning my gmail is so much quicker than my old work’s outlook, with it’s puny single Gig of space and all those useless powerpoints flying around. That’s the work powerpoints that is. I quite enjoyed the viral ones.
I arrived late last night to the news that Google has entered the browser wars. First impressions for me – something needs to be done about the slowdown/freezing that js-heavy webapps such as gmail create on IE and Firefox. Having multiple flash based sites open causes similar non-responsive issues. Chrome’s js engine, known as V8, responds favourably in benchmarks - although Firefox minions are countering this.
It would be nice if respective browser teams could fix these issues and quit with the endless ergonomic tabbed browsing memes. No one cares where you put them…
I’ll not be changing from Firefox (2!) anytime soon though. I’ve got too many plugins to drop – Chrome has no framework in place yet. And besides, Chrome is very much beta…
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