Daniel Watrous on Software Engineering

My talented brother, Tim Watrous, has worked in the advertising industry for nearly 15 years now. His background started on the technical side, but he quickly found his strengths in the larger scope of marrying the business to a best possible advertising solution. He and I often talk shop and tonight we got on the […]

One disappointment of developing for Wicket and Google App Engine (GAE) is that the automatic monitoring and reloading of modified HTML files didn’t work. It had something to do with the single threaded nature of the GAE platform. I had found a few previous efforts to make this work, but none of them worked with […]

For simplicity and security I’ve decided to integrate with the Google Account authentication mechanism that’s built into Google App Engine. This allows anyone with a Google account to login to my application without the need to setup another account. This also gives me access to the user’s valid email in order to send messages and […]

I have a large budget for books (but thanks to Amazon it doesn’t have to be as big as it could be). Sure it’s true that most of the information in programming books is online and available for free. There may even be substance to the argument that most books are out of date as […]

I did some investigation into building the RESTful API for the software licensing system using wicket. At first I was encouraged that URL management was so easy (nevermind that really old article I just linked to). Wicket Not Ideal for RESTful APIs In the end I decided that wicket was not a good choice for […]

For the user interface layer of the licensing system I was interested in using a framework like Wicket. It was a lot of work to setup. The process was made somewhat frustrating by the fact that most of Google’s results are a few years old and deal with older versions. I did finally get it […]

Having chosen Google App Engine and Java as the target for initial development it’s time to setup a development environment. Google provides a plugin to Eclipse that makes this easy. They do a great job explaining how to setup the environment at this URL: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/tools/eclipse.html Setup problems One hang up I had was an error […]

In the introduction to this series, I outlined some of the requirements for the WordPress plugin licensing platform: Speed, reliability and scalability. These are critical. Just imagine what would happen if any of those were missing. Requirements Justification A slow platform might result in significantly fewer sales. One of our use cases is to provide […]

The market for premium wordpress plugins is very active these days. Despite the disagreement over GPL specifics, there are an increasing number of extremely skilled software developers that create high quality plugins for WordPress. One problem that they all have is a licensing mechanism that will allow them to distribute their software plugin freely, but […]