Srirangan

Yes­ter­day upgraded to Ubuntu 10.4 and am glad that I did. Every­thing worked, even on older hard­ware. Next step, to set up my dev environment.

Started off with installing Mer­cu­r­ial using Synap­tic Pack­age Man­ager. Then Eclipse 3.5 along with PyDev, Yedit and Mer­cu­ri­alE­clipse plugins.

Then down­loaded the Google AppEngine SDK (Python) and extracted it to /home/{username}/google_appengine

export PATH=${PATH}:/home/{username}/google_appengine

This is optional but makes life eas­ier, unless of course you enjoy typ­ing long absolute file paths in the console.

And that’s it. You’re done.

Next for me, set­ting up dev envi­ron­ments for Android and Flex.

Cheats codes

• Ubuntu 10.4 = New ver­sion of a pop­u­lar Linux OS distribution
• Mer­cu­r­ial = Source code management
• Eclipse = IDE
• PyDev = Eclipse plu­gin for Python pro­gram­ming language
• Yedit = Eclipse plu­gin for .yaml files
• Mer­cu­ri­alE­clipse = Eclipse plu­gin for Mercurial
• Google AppEngine SDK = Libraries, tools, devel­op­ment sand­box for Google AppEngine

Apol­o­gize for not updat­ing this blog so far in 2010. A very happy new year to all my read­ers. (Yes, all three of you! ) Occa­sion­ally have been blog­ging for Xebee as well, that is my employ­ers blog. Check it out as it has some cool posts.

I take this oppor­tu­nity to announce a few things. I have been work­ing on a Face­book App these days, based on Adobe Flex, Google and (of course) Face­book APIs/libraries/platforms. For this app, I needed a very sim­ple Python based Face­book library. I tried cou­ple of API’s already avail­able, none of them fit­ted the bill.

That lead me to cre­ate Sim­ple­face­book

“sim­ple­face­book is a min­i­mal­is­tic Facebook’s REST­ful web ser­vice wrap­per for Google App Engine (Python)”.

Check it out if you are look­ing for a min­i­mal­ist Face­book library for a python web appli­ca­tion deployed on the Google App Engine. Yes, its depen­den­cies include Google App Engine libraries.

But that can be eas­ily rec­ti­fied, so feel free to fork it.

—

Update: I’ve moved Sim­ple­face­book from SVN / Google Code to Mer­cu­r­ial / Bit­Bucket. SVN to Mer­cu­r­ial for many rea­sons but pri­mar­ily the abil­ity to work in offline mode, and Google Code to Bit­Bucket so that all my projects, pub­lic and pri­vate, are in the same place.

I had been fol­low­ing up on HTML5 for the last few months and Abhay’s XKE ses­sion a cou­ple of days ago really helped bet­ter under­stand the scope and capa­bil­i­ties of HTML5 as a tech­nol­ogy. But hav­ing worked with Flex for nearly three years and being famil­iar with what the Flash plat­form does offer, there was not much in HTML5 that got me really excited.

In fact I am going to stick my neck out and make a series of claims and even­tu­ally con­clude that the ben­e­fits of choos­ing Adobe Flex today com­pletely over­shadow HTML5. Read the rest of this entry

This post con­tains the steps to build a sim­ple chat client and server appli­ca­tion using Flex 3 and BlazeDS. This will be a brief post, a detailed tuto­r­ial will be posted in sub­se­quent posts.

Read the rest of this entry

This is a quick com­par­i­son of the three Flex Data Access meth­ods. Ref­er­ence: Adobe Flex Live Docs