Stake Ventures

RSpactor is one of the greatest tools out there for developing Rails apps on the Mac (Yes it’s Mac only) using RSpec. It works just like autotest, just with out any configuration and without using more resources than absolutely necessary.

Andreas is working on a next generation Cocoa based tool, which looks great. I know many of us are using the original command line version of it still, which unfortunately broke, when the RSpec team introduced some API changes. No worries though, I’ve forked the older command line version on Git which you can also install as a gem:

sudo gem install pelle-rspactor --source http://gems.github.com

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I suppose I should write a detailed post at some point about this. But here are a couple of notes from working intermittently on Talk.org in the last couple of weeks.

First of all Python is definitely not Ruby. It is very different in many ways. So just accept that and get on with it. Ruby still puts a much larger smile on my face than Python does, but that might be inexperience.

Secondly Django is not at all like rails, even though most python guys seem to claim it is. Pylons seemed much more rails like. However I decided to stick with Django as it’s always good to learn something new.

The best resource I found for getting started was this example project Wuzhere that was demonstrated at Google IO. It is really a great guide to get your head around structuring your project. In particularly coming from Rails, I learnt way more just reading through this code than reading various tutorials on the web. A key piece of code to simplify your life as a rails guy coming over to Django is their view.py class, which acts kind of like a rails render method.

You should use the Django Google App Engine Helper if you are doing Django which is described in this little tutorial. However the approach to laying out your application taken by the Wuzhere developers seemed more logical to me than the approach suggested by the Google App Engine helpers.

Generally speaking I like the AppEngine design. The models are great even if they require you to think a bit differently about the design of your data model. I don’t see a clever way of doing callbacks on the models like with activerecord, but I suspect that something similar would be possible with clever use of Decorators

I would like to say though that while I am still a novice at Django/Python it does seem to me that there are design decisions in both that I’m not quite happy about. Once I’ve worked more with it I’ll see if I still feel that way and can formulate it a bit better.

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To make Talk.org a playground for more than just me, I’ve decided to open source it. You can find it on GitHub

I have released it as GPL3 as I think it makes sense for an app like Talk.org that we all get to learn from our experiences.

I will do my best to bring as many new features people create into the live application as possible. However be aware that at some point I may want to put some unobtrusive ads or something on it to make to pay future AppEngine bills. You have been warned. But then again you could do so yourself if you so please.

Anyway, it is a fairly simple app at the moment and is not seing large amount of use, however a fair amount of people came to try it out during the Stevenote.

These are the performance graphs from the Google AppEngine Dashboard:

The requests seem to take about 500ms each, which should improve once memcache is working properly again:

So far we have 58 users who have posted in total 166 posts. Not bad really for a tiny app, originally written last Friday over breakfast.

So far the todo list is:

• Allow users to pick their own nickname when signing up (right now it relies on what Google gives me, which is wrong)
• Atom/RSS/JSON support
• OAuth
• Followers
• Tracking

Concensus seems to be that the best way to do IM/SMS support is for a 3rd party server todo it via OAuth/HTTP as AppEngine doesn’t yet support XMPP. This is obvious as a great separate project for some Erlang geek out there.

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Well it’s not exactly a twitter clone as you can’t follow or track anyone. There is no IM or SMS support either. However you are able to do some of what you would do on Twitter. So it might come in helpful during Steve Job’s keynote if Twitter goes down. Go to Talk.org to try it out.

This is my first little play project using Google Appengine

Right now it just uses Google Accounts, so for most people you don’t even need to sign up.

So what’s next for Talk.org

My original plan for this was not for it to go the Twitter clone way. There are a few features that I think might be more fun to do than trying to be an exact clone of twitter.

Following and Tracking should not be too overly complicated features to add. But I may endup being wrong about that. From my understanding Twitter’s real scalability problems are from these two features and not the messaging plat form itself.

I’m thinking that unless they’re well designed these may endup presenting problems even on AppEngine. Of course they would only be a problem if you got people with extremely large amount of followers.

I can’t see implementing IM and SMS in the current architecture of AppEngine. However it might be possible to create a separate messaging server using Amazon EC2.

There is also a really annoying bug in Memcache on AppEngine that pretty much excludes the use of the Memcache API until it’s fixed. They are working on it so lets see.

I don’t want to use too much time on this, maybe just an hour or two a week in the future, but I think I may post the code to GitHub as soon as I get it cleaned up a bit.

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Featuring Dr Nic, Matz, Evan Phoenix, Kim Dalsgaard and Aslak Helleshøj.

Sorry for the dodgy sound quality. Need to get decent equipment at some point.

Update: I’ve made a higher quality mp4 version of this available here Please let me know if this doesn’t work.

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