Category Archives: Web Development

Google Apps Engine isn’t Amazon Web Services

Posted on by
1

For those of you who don’t know who Guido is, he’s the creator of Python and now works for Google. Recently he moved to the Google Apps Engine team. If you want a quick introduction to Google Apps Engine, just read this blog post and then watch the following two videos: (the first one shows creation of a sample application and the other one is Guido’s recap of Google Apps Engine):

Currently the Google Apps Engine is in a preview beta, and to the moment of writing this post, there’re no more inventions left. If you still want to experience the Google Apps Engine, you can download the SDK. Currently they support only Python, but they plan to support more languages as the product will mature. It really makes me curious to see what will be next language that they will support.

One important thing to understand is that Apps Engine isn’t Amazon Web Services. They both offer virtualization services, but in a different style:

Will it replace Amazon?  It sure doesn’t look like it from where I sit.  In fact, I don’t see this as much of a competitor to Amazon Web Services.  There’s some overlap in some small area (hosted web apps on EC2), but I doubt that’s the bulk of Amazon’s business.  As I said, we’ll likely end up using both (and other providers as they come along, too).

(Don MacAskill on Google Apps Engine)

In my opinion, in current stage, Google Apps Engine is aimed at and more suitable for the most standard web applications. What’s not a standard web application? YouTube for instance – because it requires not only serving loads of pages (data), but also some computation (like converting video formats).

One things is sure – now that there’s competition to AWS, it will make things much more interesting.

Arik

ASP.NET MVC extension as a sign of change at Microsoft

Posted on by
2

The new ASP.NET MVC extension seems to be a sign of change at Microsoft. This extension is born from the requests of the community, being released with full source-code and integrates with not only Microsoft’s unit testing solution, but also with the alternatives.

And from what it seems, it really brings the fun to developing Web applications with ASP.NET.

Is Microsoft really changing?

Just wanted to share this thought. And if ASP.NET MVC interests you, I recommend following ScottHa‘s and ScottGu‘s blogs and watching this excellent screencasts by ScottHa.

Arik

Handling RSS Feeds with PHP using Zend_Feed

Posted on by
21

Zend Framework is becoming a very comprehensive set of widely needed components for PHP development. As other frameworks offer similar components, one of Zend’s Framework greatest strengthens is the fact that you can use its components as stand alone components and not only as part of the MVC structure. In this post I will show how you can easily use it’s Zend_Feed component to merge feeds.

Recently I though of making one combines RSS feed of both of my blogs and my twitter updates. There are some RSS merging services out there, and there’s also Yahoo pipes which seems that it’s most useful ability is to do various RSS tweaking tasks. As part of my playing around with the Zend Framework, I’ve decided to make this merged RSS feed using the Zend_Feed component. Actually at the end I’ve realized that this merged feed idea is quite useless, but at least this post came out of it :-)

Most of the basic actions, like importing an RSS feed, creating an RSS feed and more are covered in the Zend Framework manual. In this post I will elaborate more on the more advanced topics, like sorting and merging RSS feeds but I will also go briefly over the more basic stuff as well.

So let’s begin.

Continue reading →