Summer of Technology 2014 @Contribute

A new summer, a new Summer of Technology! As tradition prescribes, there's an interesting workshop/session every Tuesday of the summer. I will be hosting a session on Google's Cloud platform, but there's a lot of other topics as well.

Pick your session and subscribe!

XPath in Internet Explorer

Every web developer knows how difficult it is to get things running on all browsers. Usually, Internet Explorer is doing the best it can to make your life a hell. A good example thereof, is it's lack of XPath support.

In most browsers, you can use document.evaluate() to pass an XPath expression, and get a result. In Internet Explorer, however, this method just doesn't work. No error message, no result, just some unexpected behavior in your application. Luckily, there's an easy solution that doesn't require you to rewrite your code, or implement some ugly if IE hacks.

The solution is called Wicked Good Xpath, and is an open source project maintained by Google. It's easy to use, and doesn't interfere with your existing code. You can find everything you need here.

Basically, all you have to do is download the .js file, and add it to your page through script tags.

<script src="wgxpath.install.js"></script>

Then you have to call wgxpath.install() from your JavaScript code, and the document.evaluate() function will be available.

Web Accessibility Course

Attention fellow web developers! Google is giving a free online course to improve the accessibility of your website/application. While this might not seem like a big issue, the World Health Organization estimates the number of people with visual impairments to be 285 million. You can save them from a lot of frustration, and offer a far better user experience by following a few guidelines.

Making your site more user friendly to blind or low vision people doesn't have to be 'a pain in the ass'. It should come naturally, with a minimum of extra effort. Google will provide techniques and tools, as well as expert guidance to make the world wide web a slightly better place, one site at a time.

Random Hacks of Kindness

Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) is a an initiative originated by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, NASA and the World Bank. The objective is to bring together experts around disaster management and crisis response with volunteer software developers and designers in order to create solutions that have an impact in the field.

RHoK has periodical events, known as hackathons. The next hackathon will be organized by Contribute, and will take place 2 - 3 June 2012. For more information and registration, go to http://www.rhok.be/.

Entry is free, food and drinks will be provided. This hackathon is in cooperation with the Open Knowledge Foundation, and you'll receive more information about Amnesty International through a video link with a hackathon event in Berlin.

The Story of Send

Ever wondered what happens to your email when you hit "send"? Now you can follow the journey of an email with Story of Send, a new website with a behind-the-scenes look at how your email journeys through the world, from your Internet service provider to Google's data centers and beyond.

Watch the cool animation here: http://www.google.com/green/storyofsend.

Google App Engine 1.6.5 released

Google has launched a new version of App Engine. Version 1.6.5 has some improvements on a.o. datastore,  Images API and Task Queues.

Read Google's blogpost here.

Make the web faster using SPDY

Google Developers has announced they have launched a version of mod_spdy, an Apache mod that adds SPDY support to your Apache HTTPD server. To get started, download mod_spdy and follow the install guidelines.

By default, Chrome, Chrome for Android and the most recent versions of Firefox support the SPDY protocol. It's not likely Microsoft's Internet Explorer will support SPDY in the near future.

Google Drive to launch next week

According to The Next Web, Google will launch Google Drive somewhere in the next week. Basically, Google Drive is just another cloud storage solution, but then again, it's Google. I should integrate nicely with their already existing products, such as Google Docs, Google Apps, Picasa and Android. Every user is entitled to receive 5GB for free, with the option to pay for more. It's not as much as the 50GB I blogged about earlier, but that was a limited offer.

After Box, DropBox, SugarSync and many, many others, this seems to be like the thirteenth cloud storage provider in a dozen. Let's hope Google can really offer an added value. If you're a fan of Google and their products (like I am), this should be worth checking out. There aren't a lot of details known, but the launch is expected to be on Tuesday 24 or Wednsesday 25 April.

Google Wave Sunsetting

Google has just sent reminders to all Wave-users: Google Wave is EOL. The shutting down will happen in phases, you can find the exact dates here. All services will be stopped by the end of April 2012.

Wicket 1.5 in Google App Engine

In a previous post, I explained how to quickly setup a Wicket application using Maven and Google App Engine. As you may have noticed, the default version of Wicket that is used, is 1.4. If you want to use Wicket 1.5, you have to replace Wicket dependence in your pom.xml.

This is what is there by default:

  <dependency>
      <groupId>org.apache.wicket</groupId>
      <artifactId>wicket</artifactId>
      <version>1.4.10</version>
    </dependency>

We'll replace it with:

  <dependency>
      <groupId>org.wicketstuff</groupId>
      <artifactId>wicketstuff-gae-initializer</artifactId>
      <version>1.5.5</version>
    </dependency>>

Get your app online in 10 minutes with Google App Engine!

In this post I'll explain how to easily get an app online and running in under 10 minutes. There are a few thing we need before we can start, though:

• A Google account
• Springsource ToolSuite
• Google App Engine SDK

The Google App Engine SDK can easily be installed from within STS itself.

So, once we have all these prerequisited, we can get started! First thing you have to do is tell Google you want to deploy a new application. To do this, go to the Google App Engine start page, and create an application.

I named my app blogtryouts.

Now we are ready to actually build an application. Springsource Toolsuite comes with Maven preconfigured, so we might as well use Maven and its rich collection of archetypes to get going. So, in STS, create a new Maven project (File -> New -> Other..., and then select Maven project)

A wizard starts to help you create a new Maven project. Make sure you leave the Create a simple project (skip archetype selection) UNCHECKED! We're going to select a Maven archetype to get started really fast. More information about Maven Archetypes can be found here. When you click next, you can select the maven archetype you want to use. Filter on gae, and select the archetype using the framework you desire. I chose Wicket, cause I like the way it works (and how you can have a web designer do the tedious HTML/CSS styling while you can focus on the real Java development). To use wicket, select gae-archetype-wicket.

Click Next. Now comes the screen where you enter your application information. Enter data concerning to your application in Group Id, Artifact Id and package. In the gaeApplicationName field, you enter the name of the application you created on appengine.google.com. In our case, this was blogtryouts.

Also notice the gaeApplicationVersion field. It defaults to test. We'll change it to release, to deploy a release version of our app. Click Finish. Maven will now create an archetype!

Now, there are still some issues before you can deploy your application. You have to put the Google App Engine SDK to your buildpath. I have no idea why this isn't done by default, but it isn't, so we'll have to do it ourselves. Easiest way is by right clicking your project, and select Google -> App Engine Settings... Basically, you can just hit Ok, to accept all default values.

Now that the SDK has been added, there still is 1 problem to be addressed. I think it's a bug in either STS or the Maven Archetype, but the appengine-local-runtime artifact seems to be missing. You can just go to the pom, and delete the entry.

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.google.appengine</groupId>
  <artifactId>appengine-local-runtime</artifactId>
  <version>${gae.version}</version>
  <scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

Now, build the project by using the maven package command. The necessary files and folders will be created, and your application is ready to be deployed! When Maven has finished packaging, right click your application in STS, select Google -> Deploy to App Engine... and deployment will start. When it's finished, your application is available at yourAppname.appspot.com.

If you used test instead of release in the gaeApplicationVersion I mentioned earlier, it would deploy to test.yourAppname.appspot.com.

Good luck and have fun!

Google App Engine

Recently, I started building my own website. Since I'm a Java developer, I wanted to build a website in Java. For work, I usually build web applications using Oracle's ADF, so for now, I wanted to use some other technology.

Of course, building a website in Java offers a lot of possibilities, but it also has its drawbacks. For example, most free webhosting solutions don't support Java applications. Therefore I had to either put up my own server, or find some cloud solution.

I opted for the latter, and quickly encountered Google as a provider for my needs. And more specifically: Google App Engine. After some quick research, I found that there are plugins for Eclipse (or STS, in my case) to get started easily. After installing the Google App Engine SDK Plugin for Eclipse, creating and deploying an application to the web is a matter of a few clicks!

More information on how to build applications for Google Apps Engine will follow shortly, in upcoming posts.

Stay tuned!