Talking User Experience to my dear collegue Armando Gomes and how to communicate about it in a web project, he introduced me to UWE.
UWE (UML-based Web Engineering) is a software engineering approach for the development of Web applications.
The project web site : http://www.pst.ifi.lmu.de/projekte/uwe
Codathlon
Yesterday i took part of a Codathlon session organized by Didier Girard about the hottest Google tool of the moment.
http://sites.google.com/a/codathlon.com/20080508-gae/Home
Google App Engine
Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications.
GAE is a hosted runtime environment for Python web applications. But other languages are coming.
http://appengine.google.com/
My first impressions
Vincent Bostoen introduced the GAE & we began coding our first web application.
The install is very easy: pyhon & GAE.
We had our GAE account created so we could very quickly deploy our web app.
The local development does not mean downloading a jboss, an oraclexe, etc on your computer:
dev_appserver.py helloword
and then just check your localhost:8080 !!!
Deployment does not mean installing a web server, a database, configuring the matrix flows etc.
No you only update your web app:
appcfg.py --email=yourgmail update helloword
and then you test your online url configured
the url is based on a regular expression, which lets you configure any url you want: bye bye mod_jk, urlrewrite, ...
You can access to some nice Google APIs as:
DATASTORE API (http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html)
USERS API (Google Account)
So with a few code lines you can develop and deploy a real web app. That was the most impressive & frightening!
We finished by testing a post from a GWT (Google Web Tools) page to a GAE…
A nice & sunny 8th May!
Just found a very nice example of web app using GAE : AMAZING
geodatastore