Josh Heitzman's Blog O' Code » Appcelerator

No Appcelerator for my first App Engine app

Josh Heitzman — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:47:35 +0000

Playing Travian inspired me to develop web based strategy, and after surveying a number of others to get a feel for the market I’ve begun game design and technical prototyping.

I thought I’d give Appcelerator a try, since it can create project for Google’s App Engine. I noticed that they have a plug-in for Eclipse; however, after installing Eclipse and their plug-in I found that their project wizard was throwing an exception at the last step. It may be that they expect the Eclipse install to include certain thing such as a Java development environment (I had installed the C/C++ only distro), but I they have a command line tool for creating projects as well, so I gave that a shot. I was able to run the created project locally and deploy it to App Engine and run it successfully there as well. However, I found that the project was not setup to use Pylons as I had mistakenly gotten the impression that it would be. I created a Appcelerator project for Python rather then AppEngine with their command line tool and I found that that project did use Pylons and it shouldn’t be terribly difficult to get that project up and going on App Engine by following these directions. I also found that the default generated index page was HTML 4.01 rather then XHTML 1.0 and after switching it over, I found that a number of the Appcelerator specific things wouldn’t pass validation (the original HTML 4.01 version didn’t pass validation either).

As I’d like my first web app to actually serve up pages that are valid, that means no Appcelerator for me. I also have a strong desire to not be involved with javasript in any way shape or form. I was willing to live loading a third party script I never needed to touch, but I noticed that the example for some of the Appcelerator widgets involved adding app specific javascript.

I’m going to start over with a pure Pylons project and then go back to trying to get my CSS stylings to work in both FireFox and IE. IE doesn’t seem to be handle things tagged with float as well as FireFox so I may just throw in the towel on having a dynamic layout that will adapt to different width windows and just go with a fixed width of that will work on a display 800 pixels wide.

Google App Engine lock-in … not a problem

Josh Heitzman — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:24:30 +0000

Well, even if Appcelerator does expose some of the specifics of Google’s App Engine platform, there has already been a first pass at hacking up a port of the App Engine API to Amazon’s EC2 platform that is already up and running at AppDrop. It seem highly likely to me this new open source project will get decent support from the OSS community and that more hosts will be offering App Engine compatible platforms, so I figure on trying out Appcelerator and App Engine as soon as I actually need a website to go along with my game.

I’ve already got a fair investment in a web site, which has never been publicly deployed, written against Pylons. At this point a first pass at getting Pylons working against App Engine has be completed by Ian Bicking, so probably the second thing (after getting familiar with Appcelerator) I’ll have to have a look at when a website becomes necessary is if Appcelerator will integrate with Pylons in anyway, shape, or form. Pylons is a let-you-replace-what-ever-you-want type of light weight framework, so I’m not to worried about it being the blocking one of the pair.

Update: Mark Luffel one, of the Appcelerator devs, just commented that “We’ll have a version of Appcelerator+Pylons+AppEngine soon, but glueing those three together shouldn’t be hard…” and that is most excellent news!

Appcelerator ported to Google App Engine

Josh Heitzman — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:47:37 +0000

Just read that Appcelerator has been ported to Google’s new App Engine. I had never run across Appcelerator before in my searching for Python web related libraries. Perhaps because Appcelerator supports a number of languages other then Python (Java, PHP, Ruby, .NET, and Perl).

Appcelerator definitely warrants a in depth look, as it purports to enable rapid development of web 2.0 pages without needing to do any JavaScript coding (it looks like Appcelerator includes JavaScript libraries/widgets but you don’t need to write JaveScript calls into them, rather you use some short snippets of their Web Expression Language in some “on” attrbitutes of HTML elements.

Since Appcelerator has been ported to Google’s new App Engine it may allow one to write a web app such that it can be run both on App Engine and on one’s own servers (or in the future other folks cloud’s). Whether that is feasible or not will depend on how much of App Engine is exposed through Appcelerator. Right now the Appcelerator site has numerous messages about new documentation being in the process of being pushed to the site so once their docs are updated the picture will be come clearer.