Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Got my invitation to Google Apps!

I got my invitation to the Google App Engine. So now I am trying to learn JavaScript and going back into Python. I looked into Python for Blender (here) but did not go far.

I wanted to get into Java to help with my understanding of ColdFusion. Java itself is OK but there is way too much buzz-wording going on with Sun. For example, Beans used to mean packaged objects that you could share over the internet. Now Java NetBeans is some kind of IDE for Java development? And don't get me started with Eclipse! The program is great, but a big memory hog because of Java.

So, Google App Engine is Python. I have mixed feelings, python is cool but as a web development language? And it acts like CGI, as in Perl, but only to an extent.

Perl is one language where the better a person is at writing it, the harder the code is to read. A great Perl developer can do more on one line than a C programmer can all day long. It is about equal to ColdFusion, except when you try to read it.

So what are my intentions with App Engine? Well I would like a basic web service that I can use to push data in and out of for this blog. I really don't know what for, but it seems fun right now. It would be easier if there were free LAMP hosts out there, maybe virtualization will bring that around.

I ought to check. Amazon's EC2 is all virtual servers, and so might be Google's app engine. If someone was sitting on a ton of bandwidth and a decent Linux server with XEN, they could host hundreds of LAMP servers on the cheap.

Random Musings...

Yes, I have random thoughts. Sometimes they are not random enough so I have created a random musing tab on the right. You might see it say something insulting, or ridiculous.. or both. It is a JavaScript file I have hosted on my google page creator site http://chris.hillman.googlepages.com/

The issue is that blogger does not let you upload some things. I suppose flash stuff might be the same (I will have to test that). So to fix that you can get a Google Page Creator account (I got one the day they were announced) and upload there.

So, for example my script's URL is http://chris.hillman.googlepages.com/randomtext.js, because my Google page's url is http://chris.hillman.googlepages.com and the file is loaded to the root by default. Then I just specify the URL in a SCRIPT SRC attribute and BOOM! Random text joy.

It is really pretty lame but if you have a .JS file that you want to reference from Blogspot, this is one way to host it for free. Thank you a million Google, you guys ROCK!

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