Java DevOps engineer / Scrum Master
Less than a minute!
That’s what it took to get App Engine running locally and seeing the first page served in my browser!
All you need to do, is to add an extra source for software updates and select the Google App Engine. It’s all explained here.
Long story short: Google App Engine is Google’s public application hosting service. You can run your own web application, databases, etc. on Google servers. It’s free for small applications.
Of course you could run your own server (either rent one or run one at home), but this means you have the maintenance problems, security issues and performance problems to deal with.
Unfortunately I have not been able to attend JFALL this year, there was a session which was about Google App Engine.
I have some ideas about using Google App engine. Currently I am thinking about using it to store data for my Android applications.
It’s definitely something I’m going to look into very soon.
This guy got a small Wicket application running on App Engine, cool eh!
For the last days I’ve been looking in to some products that a potential client is using and I have no experience with. There are three development process related products that nicely integrate together:
As they are commercial and all from the same company (Atlassian) it is no surprise that they integrate very well. Reports from Bamboo and Jira can be published via Confluence so that all essential information can be found in the same place – nice for both management and developers.
It is also possible to use Bamboo as a release management tool, somebody wrote a nice article about it and developed some plugins. This is about a year old, so maybe it is built in by now.
After following instructions from HTC its website at http://developer.htc.com/adp.html my phone is now running the new version of Android. Most noticeable are the new camera and market applications. Also there is a battery usage overview, which shows you what apps are sucking up most of your battery power.
Meter Maid is much less popular than Pregnancy Ticker, but still it’s nice to know that there are now over 200 users.
I’m still looking for sponsors to finish the new release, unfortunately I have had many meetings with potential sponsorship candidates but nothing came out of it.
Today I saw that the download counter for the free version of my Android application “Pregnancy Ticker” is approaching the 50,000 mark. My estimate is that it will pas this milestone before the end of the month. It’s difficult to believe that such a huge number of expecting parents are consulting my application regularly, it’s an honor!
After being interviewed a few times after winning the Android developer contest I was interviewed again for an article about successful mobile phone applications.
The article can be found here: Z24 web site (Dutch language alert).
It started as a simple tool to keep track of how far along my wife was. I put it on the market thinking that that at least a few other persons could enjoy it. So when the downloads counter passed the 20,000 mark it was a rather strange experience!
Never did I expect it to be so popular and loved. People write the nicest comments.
Because of the high demand I also get a lot of mails and request which I enjoy answering, it is not that much work. Also I decided to put out a paid version of the application as an answer to some of the most popular requests. One of the requests is to have week by week images of the baby its progress. For this I hired an artist who is working on the images right now.
After reading the Android blog entry about releasing 1.5 for the dev phone I could not resist installing it. By following the instructions on the HTC site all went well. I used the ADB method (image recovery) No problems whatsoever!
To get a connection with the phone network operator I had to reboot a third time (1st time: radio firmware, 2nd time OS 1.5).
My first impression of the GUI is that it is a bit sleeker, but sometimes feels slower.
Video recording and automatic screen rotation both work well. The touch keyboard and voice command options are welcome new features.
After more testing and developing the GPS parking beta seems more viable than ever. Currently all major zones have been added and only the 10 cent and limited time parking areas have to be added.
This is the new main screen. As you can see there is an extra button that allows for selecting a zone by map.
This is the map screen. The screen is in ‘manual mode’ because the GPS is not turned on or available (e.g. indoors). The user can tap on the zone where he is parked and the application will retrieve the zone information.
In GPS mode this is done automatically.
