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 topic cloud computing. I mentioned some of my experience with the two most prominent platforms available, Google App Engine (GAE) and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The following details come from an email that I drafted for him to......
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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 the current version of Wicket and GAE. I went without it for a while, but restarting the web server after every markup change finally drove me to figure it out. Working with the project that I setup using......
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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 other communication related to the service I provide. So far I have three separate ‘areas’ for interfacing with my service. The first area is comprised of public pages, such as the home page or privacy policy. The next......
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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 There may even be substance to the argument that most books are out of date as soon as they hit the shelf because technology moves so fast. Oh well. I get huge value from books. They save me many hours of time that I might spend scouting around for a snippet here or an......
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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 the RESTful API. The crux came in treating HTTP methods differently. In other words, for a given resource URI, I want to do something different for GET, POST, PUT and DELETE. That’s not one of wicket’s strengths, so......
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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 working and here’s the process. Other articles take the default Google App Engine project and modify it to accommodate wicket. I decided to go the other direction and start with the wicket quickstart. This is the process I......
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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 when first trying to install the plugin in eclipse. It complained about “An error occurred while collecting items to be installed”. Several files came back saying “Unable to read repository” and “Read timed out”. It was possible to......
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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 a free, limited time trial, and poor performance when installing or using a plugin would almost certainly decrease sales conversions. Reliability issues would, at a minimum, reduce developer confidence when coupling a new plugin to the licensing platform.......
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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 restrict its use to those who have paid. In some cases it is desirable to provide a free limited time trail. In this series of articles I’m going to show you how I develop a licensing system for......
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