Deploying to App Engine

This is sooo easy (if you use Eclipse);

- Get Eclipse
- Install the App Engine Plug-in
- Create your app container on App Engnie
- Create an App Engine project in Eclipse
- Import your source into the project
- edit Web.xml and Appengine-Web.xml
- edit logging.properties
- Insert the App Name into the project
- Click the button - your app is deployed and running

Need to version your apps, easy, increment the version number & click ...

Need to roll-back on app-engine, easy ...

Need to apply access controls, easy ...

Need to deliver your app via Google Apps, easy ...

Need a secure connection to your on-premise data, easy ...

There is for sure a lesson here for EC2 (create instance -> create AMI -> ... not straight forwards - and I still have servers to administer, even if they are Virtual) ... Haven't looked at Azure yet (doing that in a couple of weeks time so stay tuned) but MS will have to go some to give a slicker apps experience than this ...

Don't Play Golf in the Garden

Google Developer Days & I/O

It looks like Google currently have no plans to hold a Developer Day in the UK / Europe or the civilised world; currently there are plans for a day in South America and two dates in Asia!

http://code.google.com/events/developerday/2009/

For a company that produces the Maps and Earth products, Google shows a stunning lack of awareness of life outside the USA; not to mention the serious lack of support that this shows to the thousands of Google employees in Europe!

Hopefully this oversight will be rectified in due course!

VGSA & SMB Crawl

It appears that there is an "Undocumented Software Feature" in the current VGSA effecting SMB crawls! For some reason if you specify just the folder root, you get back no results (VGSA apears not to do a dir listing); if you specify patern matches, i.e. *.pdf it treats this as absolute and if you specify files with .htm extensions you get an error in the Follow and Crawl.

The only way I have been able to get the VGSA to crawl SMB is to specify every file individually and even then I cannot crawl .htm files in file shares. I suspected that it could be the config on the Windows 2003 File Server, but I have pretty much discounted that. I think that there is an issue with the VGSA, I need to test against a real GSA to confirm this ... may have to wait a couple of weeks now as I am about out of time with everything else I have to do.

If I get any further with this, will post my findings here. If any of you have had a similar issue with VGSA, please get in touch and let me know.

UPDATE: Actually, this looks like it could be an issue with Windows 2003 Server ... needs further investigation ...

BPOS - Some Observations (Nearly There)

I now have an almost fully working BPOS Trial;

Users can now access Sharepoint and LiveMeeting and Admin can now access SharePoint. I have not done anything different so I am assuming someone has fixed something at the back end. For some reason I still can't administer LiveMeeting & for both LievMeeting and SharePoint my Admin user gets challenged to select from a list of non-existing certificates for authentication.

To get this far has taken one week and intervention from several people at Microsoft.

Once in, the service does look very corporate, the UI is for sure more slick than Google Apps. This will appeal to enterprise users. The product is tied nicely to on-premise MS environments - less so for non-MS environments, as you would expect. I can see the more conservative enterprises embracing this technology - BPOS provides a step-change in working practices and some cost reduction and does not cause the kind of disruption and radical transofrmation in working practices that Google Apps engenders.

I will be really interested to see how much the adoption of this technology is determined by age; my gut feeling is that Generation X/Y (1971 - present) may be more inclined to go the disruptive Google path whilst the older generation may go with the security blanket of Microsoft! I know this is a generalisation but I wonder if we might see this as an underlying trend?

I suspect that long-term the battle for the clouds is going to be fought in the schools, colleges and universities; people tend to stick with what they know so capture this market and you secure your future (to an extent).

I also wonder how big a role App Engine will play in this decision. Many enterprises use MS for Email & Office but use Java for Apps and Services; with the tight integration between Apps and App Engine, I wonder if this will influence many enterprises to embrace the Google Apps product as part of their App Migration to the Cloud strategy. I certainly know of organisations already who are doing precisely this.

For my part, I am going with Google because they offer the more Open and more Standard platform. That and I deployed Google Apps for my company in one hour, it took me seven days to get to (almost) the same point with BPOS; and Google Apps is (significantly) cheaper, and Google Apps offers more functionality, and I love the different way of working and the different interface that Google offers. BUT most of all, I love just how powerful App Engine is (just as soon as a few niggly limitations are lifted); App Engine is where enterprises are going to see real savings, well beyond what Apps / BPOS can offer and not just savings but new opportunities for developing services that have been to expensive and to difficult up to now.

BPOS Trials Cont.

So now I can log in to BPOS using my admin account and using a User account that I have created.

I have Exchange, Calendar & Contacts working.

I am still having problems with SharePoint & LiveMeeting. The DNS error has gone away, but neither service will allow me to authenticate with my admin account so that I can configure them.

When I access the link to Configure LiveMeeting Services, I get a Sign in was denied error.

For SharePoint, I have created a new Site Collection using the Team template; when I click on the Site Settings link I get asked to provide a certificate, but there are non listed. Interestingly, having had my credentials rejected several times, I can now log in (even with the cert error).

THIS (SharePoint) HAS JUST SUDDENLY STARTED WORKING AS I TYPE THIS POST ...

P.S. I have also noticed that if my thick-client signin app is running and I have signed in there as a user, and I sign in to the admin console via a browser as an admin user, when I try to access services as admin to configure them I actually get authenticated with those services as the user and not the admin. (I have made sure the login client is not running and ensured that I am trying to authenticate against LiveMeeting with the admin account, but it still does not accept the admin creds.)

World Domination

So Oracle have bought MySQL and are buying Sun!

It looks like we are going to end up with three major players in IT;

• Microsoft
• Oracle
• Google

My initial reaction is, I don't think that this is a good thing.

IBM seem to be diminishing by degrees and everyone else is being aquired.

Having said that I don't think this is a good thing, maybe it is. Perhaps we need this to happen to arrive at a common platform. A common platform would make things easier; maybe even make things better (not sure about that).

EC2

The sign-up process for AWS / S3 / EC2 is a bit long-winded ...

However, it is straight-forwards and seems to work OK. I now have my account active and a test AMI that I need to run. I have also just about figured out how to connect EC2 and App Engine to do want I want. Hopefully I can get a trial working this week otherwise it will be mid next month before I can do this.

I also need to get signed up for MS BizSpark and take a look at the Azure platform to see what can be done with that.

Busy, busy, busy ...

BPOS Woes

So now I have access to BPOS, I am having some challenges getting it working. Here is a brief summary of the issues so far;

1. response is v. slow (expected as per their T&C's advising not to provision non-US users)
2. SharePoint service - DNS Server not available, access error
3. JavaScript errors on Content Pages (UserCache?)
4. Broken Links / Content not available
5. LiveMeeting cannot be accessed; does not accept the admin user creds.
6. using the SSO client when accessing SharePoint, asks me to download the client again?
7. when accessing services via the SSO client, get directed to a web page asking me to sign in?

So far the only services that appear to work are Email and Contacts.

I am doing all this using IE on Vista; I haven't even dared to try this on my Mac yet!

I will keep plugging away, suspect I will be raising a bunch of tickets with MS Support.

BPOS Registration

I now have access to BPOS thanks to two guys at Microsoft Support who had to manually provision the account for me. At least I can vouch for the effectiveness of the Support.

I suspect that the BPOS site has been built using MOSS with AJAX support (although I don't know this for sure). I know that the AJAX support in MOSS is new and generally regarded as a bit flakey by MOSS consultants I have spoken to.

I think that the data required for the online provisioning got corrupted during the registration process and meant that the online application could not complete the request and required manual intervention.

It took three days to get the service activated and then I had to get a password reset from support (which has to be done over the phone)! That happened pretty quickly. Once that was sorted I was in.

I am now going to have a crack at setting up the domain, registering some users and getting the SharePoint service working. I have spoken to another company who tried this, apparently they could not get the SharePoint service to work, but I don't know what the issue was. They gave up and moved their company onto Google.

First impressions are that Google Apps and BPOS are very different - the only thing they really seem to have in common is email and calendar and the two approaches to collaboration appear at first glance to be quiet different. I suspect that Corporate users are going to find BPOS more attractive at face value as it gives them the same experience as they are used to whereas Google presents a very different experience and requires a different way of thinking about how people work. This will be the biggest threat to Google once Microsoft finally get BPOS working properly.

I shall pick this up again next week and keep playing with it.

P.S. I am also in the process of getting my apps moved onto EC2, so I will post some observations on that platform here shortly.

BPOS

Business Productivity Office Suite - bit of a misnomer if you ask me.

3 days to get the account activated (and Microsoft had to do this manually) and now I can't get my admin account password issued. I recon another 3 days to get the password, so a week to provision the account, a dozen emails to support, not the best experience to convince me to put my business or my clients business on the platform.

Also interesting to note in the BPOS T&C's they recommend NOT provisioning any users outside the USA; they only have US data centres and the service does not perform well outside the US!

Interestingly MS are selling aggressively in the UK, and I bet they are not telling the companies that they are selling to that their T&C's advise against using the service from the UK.

Plus, their Azure platform recently had a 22 hour outage (longer than all of Googles outages over the past 10 years combined), and when interviewed on the subject on the Saturday they quoted that as soon as the team got in on Monday they would investigate it; so I guess their Cloud SLA is Mon - Fri 9 - 5!

I really want to give BPOS a chance, I am sure that MS could deliver something pretty slick, they just seem to be going about it half-arsed right now.

Billy No-Mates

I have added the Followers Gadget to the Blog;

Please, if you are reading this, add yourself so I know who you are - add your friends (even if they don't read this blog) - add your dog! I don't want to end up looking like a Billy-No-Mates :-(

Java API support on App Engine

I have logged a defect against App Engine relating to it not supporting FileWriter, Threads and Network Connections. I would urge (beg) you all to go to the Google defect page and vote for this defect to be fixed by Starring it.

To link to the defect Click here.

Hopefully if enough people point out the sheer stupidity of this Google will get the message and fix it and then perhaps we can actually make use of what has the potential to be an awesome platform.

The Security Wombles strike AGAIN!

Yet again a great idea spoilt by sheer bloody stupidity!

For some bizarre reason the Security Wombles at Google have decided in their infinite wisdom that you cannot write files on App Engine! I suspect they will use the excuse that it is a security issue, which is frankly b*****ks.

Do they not think that many people use files in their applications? I now have to completely change the persistence model of my application to work around this mind-numbing stupidity. But, it gets worse ... I persist data as XML files and then use XSLT to generate AJAX / HTML files that are the presentation tier.

So not only do I have to completely change my persistence layer, but I now have to completely re-architect my presentation tier. If I want to go ahead and put my application on app engine I am now going to have to write way more code than I have in my current app, it will be more not less expensive to develop and maintain and will require more processing capacity rather than less, and will be less responsive to user requests.

My advice right now to any one considering App Engine would have to be, don't bother. For all the talk of adopting Open Standards, the platform is not as open as they would have you believe.

I am going to deploy my code on EC2 with Tomcat / Apache - it supports the full Java API, you can even write files!!!!!

! Google Dudes - if you are reading this you have to fix this; I will be actively advising my clients to avoid App Engine and go for EC2 until this is fixed!

We have ignition

Have just had the account access granted for the early access Java App Engine >-)

Now to port my apps.

Java App Engine

So it works pretty much as I expected. Doesn't look like you can deploy frameworks like Struts on there right now; I didn't think you would be able to so kept my apps pretty vanilla - should be easy to move onto App Engine.

I have signed up for the Technology Preview, so will see if I get accepted - soon as I am on I will move my apps up there and maybe publish the Android client I have developed.

Interesting Times

Google have just announced that they are entering the VC space;

http://www.google.com/ventures/

An they have FINALLY release Java for App Engine;

http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/