I have a notional goal for this blog to post at least one update per month, but sometimes I’ll be working away on projects in the background and not really have anything specific finished and / or worth writing a post about. Enter what I’ve decided to call the “Hi, John. What’s Happening?” post.
So what’s happening? Mostly, it’s that I’ve started a(nother) personal web project with the intention of learning about Google’s cloud hosting service, Google App Engine, and the Spring MVC web application framework.
App Engine is an interesting technology and one I’ve been meaning to dig into for some time. Essentially it allows Python or Java applications to be hosted on Google’s server infrastructure with all the availability and scalability that it brings, provided that the applications adhere to certain patterns and restrictions that allow the system to distribute them effectively across the Google cloud.
Hosting on Google App Engine is free if the load placed on the system by your application stays within quotas set by Google, so it would seem a great way to build highly available applications with minimum initial investment of time and money. If your application grows beyond the free quotas – roughly equivalent to five million pageviews per day the the time of writing – the odds are you’re making enough money from it anyway to cover your costs.
Spring MVC is one of the more popular Java web application frameworks, but it’s not one that I’ve had a chance to use in my day job. Version 3.0 has recently been released and it promises even easier, annotation based configuration for many more typical web application tasks. It’s very different from the Struts and WebObjects frameworks that I’ve used in the past.
As if learning App Engine and Spring MVC weren’t enough, I also decided to build this project with a slightly unusual user interface that makes heavy use of jQuery and modal forms and presents some unique challenges of its own. I drew the line at learning Groovy and Grails or Python and Django too though. Maybe next time.
I find I learn best when I have a specific project in mind, and for now this site is just such a tool to learn about App Engine and Spring MVC. I don’t want to say much more about it at this point as, like a lot of these “classroom projects” that I start, I’m not sure if it’ll ever see the light of day!
That’s what’s happening.
John Girvin is an experienced a software engineer and web developer based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He draws on over 14 years of hard won, real world experience of different projects, clients and working environments.
John is currently working with the Art Technology Group (ATG), developing J2EE based, market leading e-commerce technology.
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