We have recently committed the first stab at a google-gears enabled Appcelerator SDK. Google Gears (now just called “Gears”) is a really awesome browser plugin that gives you some out-of-process Javascript capabilities like offline and multithreading via worker pools.
With the next release of the SDK, Appcelerator’s javascript servicebroker will now automagically (and transparently) switch to using a Gears-enabled servicebroker when talking to your service-backend. That means your application will perform faster because the AJAX communication between client and server (especially for apps using fast polling) will be out-of-process using Gears’ worker pool.
You have to do nothing to enable this in your application. When you Appcelerator application loads, a small piece of code will check to see if Gears is enabled and will dynamically load the gears-enabled servicebroker code.
Popularity: 9% [?]
We know you’re excited about Google’s App Engine. How can you help it? If the opportunity to run your apps on a 20,000 terabyte per day cloud computer isn’t enough, certainly the ability to run Python on that cloud must be!
We were excited too, we admit. So yesterday we started porting our existing python server-side code to the App Engine, and today we’re releasing it through our developer network. This afternoon we ported Tejus’s appTunes demo to the App Engine and deployed it at http://apptunes.appspot.com.
So, how can you be incredibly hip too?
First, download and install Python 2.5, the App Engine SDK, and the Appcelerator SDK.
Now, make yourself a project and launch it locally (replacing myapp with your project’s name)
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| app create:project . myapp appengine
cd myapp
app run:project |
If this is your first time on the developer network, you’ll need to enter your login.
If everything installed correctly you will see a bunch of logging info ending with:
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| Running application myapp on port 8080: http://localhost:8080 |
Like the other Appcelerator backends, you can find your message handlers in app/services/. So, go digest the App Engine documentation and write something great. Once you’re ready to send your app to the cloud just run:
This will ask you for your App Engine account info, and then upload your project.
We’re putting together a screencast of this, and now that I’ve finished futzing with Windows command-line problems for this integration, maybe I’ll get some time to learn the Datastore API.
And now, a message from our sponsors:
In the spirit of open source and shared learning, we’d like to acknowledge a few key pieces that we put together to make this demo application that Tejus built happen:
- Doug McCune for his super bad ass CoverFlow Flex Component. We’ve used the Appcelerator Widget API to widgetize this flex widget and allow it to be both declaratively added to markup and the power of Appcelerator’s Web Expression Language to add remoting capabilities for data binding. This also shows off the power of using Appcelerator + Adobe’s Flex bridge to get the best of both worlds.
- JS Sound Kit for the streaming audio for playing the MP3s. Again, we built this as a reusable widget.
- Jamendo and the independent artists for the awesome, DRM-free music and cool looking coverart.
Tech Tags: appcelerator ajax flex appengine google ria javascript opensource
Popularity: 26% [?]
So we managed to sneak one additional feature into the upcoming Appcelerator 2.1 release. Those of you developing for the iPhone will be pleased to know that we added a new condition - ‘orientationchange’ - so you can handle the origintationchanged event on the iPhone in an on-expression. How cool is that? Very. So throw this onto the pile with the new build process, project command line tools, the eclipse plugin/ide (written by Mark Luffel), the developer network (it’s slick — just wait’ll you see it), and a ton of little features and fixes all over the place. Not to mention improvements to a bunch of the widgets (like the datatable which now supports custom formatter functions, sticky sort, etc.).
Popularity: 7% [?]
