The magic of online software: it gets better

Google App Engine 1.3.1 just released. From release notes, this little nugget:

"Reduced error rate with Automatic Datastore Retries - We've heard a lot of feedback that you don't want to deal with the Datastore's sporadic errors. In response, App Engine now automatically retries all datastore calls (with the exception of transaction commits) when your applications encounters a datastore error caused by being unable to reach Bigtable. Datastore retries automatically builds in what many of you have been doing in your code already, and our tests have shown it drastically reduces the number of errors your application experiences (by up to 3-4x error reduction for puts, 10-30x for gets)."

I like a service where you wait and things magically get better with no code changes on our part.

Now how about full-text search, https support, and map-reduce across your data? :)

Thinking locally with Twitter

Today I've been reading about using local information in Twitter. Below is a rapid drive-by of a few sites and then some thoughts.

Screencast of Thinkmeter

DemoGirl made an unsolicited screencast of Thinkmeter in action:



I'd rather listen to her than me anyway. Thanks DemoGirl!

Asynchronous Email Gotchas in App Engine

Summary: It's easy to send email asynchronously using App Engine and Django, but beware path differences between development and production environments.

Sending email is a standard part of running a website.  For instance, we might email the admins when a new user registers, or email a user when they've requested a password reset.  These emails are triggered while handling an HTTP request.  Therefore, if something goes wrong, it could interfere with the user's session by returning a 500 error or by slowing down the response.

Does it matter that you can identify a Google App Engine app?

http://blog.stringbuffer.com/2009/05/how-to-identify-if-website-is-hosted.html

StringBuffer describes a few ways to possibly identify a Google App Engine app:

• The website's CNAME points to ghs.google.com, ghs.l.google.com or appspot.l.google.com
• Accessing the website's /form path returns a Google-styled 404 page
• The website's "Server"-header is "Google Frontend"

What I want to know is, does it matter? Is it harmful that an App Engine app can be outed? Useful? Hidden option c?

jQuery Autogrow and IE

One cool HTML widget that's been getting popular these days is the auto-growing text area. It expands as you type (you've probably used this widget in Facebook comments). Turns out there's a nice jQuery plugin that provides this functionality: jQuery autogrow plugin. I recommend it!

Sadly, this plugin has an IE-specific bug (weird, I know). IE complains of an illegal argument (versions: IE8, jQuery 1.3.2, and autogrow plugin 1.2.2)

Great MinneBar

Fantastic MinneBar this weekend. We presented on the Google App Engine again. You can see slides here. It was fun. Lots of interest. Turns out a giftag developer was there (one of the larger App Engine apps). He was too shy to speak up (oh well), but afterwards told us "scalable is an understatement."

Thanks to Luke, Ben, Matt, sponsors, presenters, participants, bartenders.

Dan