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Closed 10 years ago.
I am beginning development on a new AppEngine application using Groovy. It will be medium-sized and use a number of AppEngine services. It will have both a regular and a mobile website, using HTML 5 and JQuery.
Which of the two frameworks suits my case best? And why?
With Graeme (Grails project lead), we looked recently into making the latest Grails run again in App Engine, and we stumbled across some OpenJDK bugs that prevent the latest Grails from even starting on App Engine. So till those issues are resolved, and we are able to resolve other potential issues that may arise, recent Grails versions won't run properly, if at all, on App Engine. So Gaelyk seems to be the sole "Groovy" option on App Engine for now.
I am not directly comparing Grails vs. Gaelyk on App Engine but maybe my blog posts will help you in making a decision: http://bit.ly/9BRQRP. In general you are better off with Gaelyk because the cold startup times are lower (assuming you don't want to pay for a reserved instance). Gaelyk provides a nice abstraction layer on top of all the App Engine services which makes using them easier. The Grails App Engine plugin only helps you with enabling your Grails app for deployment on Google's platform.
I spent long time trying to make Grails work with GAE last year but I encountered lots of problems with long cold start... Grails took more than 30sec to start and at this time, it prevented Grails from being used with GAE. I asked some questions on Grails forums but no answer so I decided to find another solution and found Play! that works like a charm with GAE. It is not Groovy but pure java and I find it is the best thing I've seen around Java for a long time. So Gaelyk is a nice solution if you absolutely want Groovy but I'm a big fan of Play! now and I would advice to take a glance at it ;)
I gave up Grails on GAE and it turned out I like Gaelyk more than Grails in some areas for GAE. So using gaelyk is a cooler option on GAE.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm about to start building my first mobile app and wanted some direction. The app will need to:
run on iPhone, Windows Phone, and Android
access data from a database
be able to determine where it is (e.g., when I cross a state border, when I enter a city, or, generally, when I change locales)
the GUI will be relatively straightforward
After doing a bit of research, I have a few questions:
Should I use a framework (e.g., Rho, Appcelerator, or PhoneGap) or HTML5/CSS3/JS? Or, would I use both of those in combination?
I want to sell the app, so does that preclude building it as a website (i.e., HTML5/CSS3/JS)? In other words, if I build it as a website, doesn't that mean a user won't have to download it and install it like a native mobile app? I like the idea of making it a "native" mobile app vs. a website, although maybe I shouldn't.
Is REST the best way to access my data? My thought is to have a SQL Server database and build a REST service using .NET.
And other tips or guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Jay
If you use a tool such as Appcelerator then you the end product will be native. Appcelerator framework obfuscates the underlying native interfaces for android/iOS. There are a few instances where you'll need to know the differences between the two, for example when to use what Appcelerator class for each device, but in essence, you can write once and deploy to each device. Been using it for a while and is very nice. Appcelerator will give you all the hooks you need to tap into the devices natively.
PhoneGap will just wrap up your app and create a 'web app'. Basically a packaged website. IMO Appcelerator would be the way to go. This is more similar to your second bullet. You'll build the website, you just won't host it on a server. It will be packaged up and deployed to the device. In essence the phone becomes the 'web server' but only in the sense that the device is reading web pages that are local to the device.
As far as data, REST might be the best way to go. the calls would be quick. You may not really need to build your own DB. You might want to look and see if some of the data you are going to use is already out there. Unless you are collecting data. I don't know the details of your app so I'm not sure what help this opinion provides.
Hope this helps.
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To create a web application on Google's AppEngine I was looking for a framework. During my research I came across Groovy and Grails. I'm a Java kind of guy so I prefer something Java-like above Python frameworks (like Django). So I scraped together some information and decided that Groovy and Grails are both to my liking.
While trying to dig deeper into Grails in combination with AppEngine I found that the Grails GAE Plugin hasn't been updaten in two years and on the website it says it "works with the latest Grails 1.3 RC2 release and above"[3]. The newest version of Grails (as of today) is 2.1.1[4]. So I'm wondering if the plugin is still maintained. Of course, the plugin could be so good, that it doesn't need maintenance - but in my experience this really looks like the plugin is dead.
So what I would like to know if there are people out there currently working with (or have recently worked with) a recent version of Grails on AppEngine and whether it is a pain in the... fingertip or a solid framework.
If you believe that Grails on App-Engine is dead I would really like to hear about alternatives, so please let me know if you used a framework on AppEngine, what you used and how the experience was.
To be a bit more precise on my requirements; a framework I would want to use should
be Java-like or Java
run on Google AppEngine
have some degree of scaffolding mechanism (I'm really lazy when it comes to writing code that could easily be able to generate)
take away the pain of database handling with SQL by providing a solid NoSQL persistence layer
Before you link any other Stackoverflow posts in your answers, please be aware that I have done my research on stackoverflow before asking this, sadly I found no up-to-date information - of course I could have overlooked something, but please don't link articles older than a year, it doesn't help here.
Sorry for the long text, shorten if you like and deem it necessary.
Thank you in advance for your helpful answers.
I tried out Grails on App Engine using the plugin mentioned above. I wrote a series of blog postings about it. I don't think the Grails App Engine plugin is actively maintained anymore.
I personally switched to Gaelyk which is a lightweight web toolkit for App Engine written in Groovy. It should fulfill all your requirements.
The App Engine plugin for Grails has not been updated for 2.X. The announcement from Graem Rocher can be found here
Grails currently throws a error when you attempt to run-app against 2.1.1. An issue concerning this has been raised here
I tried Grails with Google App Engine long time ago. As in previous answers was stated - there is no current version of the plugin. However if this is an option for you to consider, try CloudFoundry service. It's fully compatible with Grails.
Update 2017 : There is a new tutorial for Grails 3.2.9
http://guides.grails.org/grails-google-cloud/guide/index.html
Consider the Play Framework a light weight framework for Web Applications.
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Closed 10 years ago.
After years /decades of using tasks managers: Lotus Notes, Outlook, Palm (that was a good one), etc.. and now using Appigo, after using Toodledo, a friend of mine and me (both programmers) got tired of how far are all those from our personal GTD style and we decided to build one, something that we can customize as much as we can moving forward. We will do it open source open to public.
Appigo and Toodledo a great inspirations from a functional and technological point of view. We like the server on the cloud, the clients on browser and mobile platforms.
We have been thinking this for a while but when we saw Grails and did some of the tutorials, coincidentally on the task manager subject, we said ‘great, we can use this technology to build ours, this sounds cool’. (at least for the web part and the model, the core part).
Following Appigo strategy also, we plan to use Google App Engine for hosting the back-end.
On the mobile side, since we do not have time for hard core objective-c and stuff and we have a decent experience on Javascript frameworks we decided to use the now popular HTML5/Javascript approach and we think we decided for Sencha but any other Framework may be fine (Dojo, jQuery, etc).
Not surprisingly, our mobile and web clients will communicate with the server primarily using REST and we plan to have a server-side MVC (Grails) and a client-side MVC (like Sencha or Dojo propose)
We do not want to bother too much about databases, we love the Grails idea of creating a model-driven objects and storage.
Our project will be open source and hosted on github for anybody to use it.
Ok, here is the actual question:
Do you guys know good books or sample apps or articles that can help us go through this end-to-end. Of course we could go alone, but we will greatly enjoy going through some books, tutorials first to glue of these things together, decide good patterns to use, learn tips, experiences..etc. We do not have experience with Grails. (but a lot of java and javascript web development), of course I can find books about Grails but we want something end to end, with a good sample focusing on practices and patterns.
Basically a book or article that somehow touches part of this topic “good practices and experience building something like a task manager that runs on Google cloud platform, has the server side done with Grails and the browser and mobile clients using robust HTML5 javascript frameworks”.
Can anybody point us into this?
Thanks!
I have done a couple of engines that are build using grails + the google app engine. My experience is that you are going to have to build up the knowledge thought actually doing the work.
It's very easy to start out but once you get about knee deep there are some very interesting problems that can crop up.
Now that being said the main resources that I have found useful are the following:
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596522735.do
http://www.amazon.com/Groovy-Action-Dierk-Koenig/dp/1932394842
http://www.manning.com/gsmith/
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/overview
The link above gives a good java over view. But you will need to be able to distill that down to groovy.
http://www.grails.org/plugin/app-engine
and finally www.google.com
but i found that most of the blogs out there are dated to earlier version of grails. And a lot of the issues they were seeing have been fix in 2.0 or are no longer issues at all.
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Closed 10 years ago.
why would I prefer Google Apps server over one of Amazon's various offerings?
the main purpose would be to store data for mobile apps, so I suppose cost and programming language are the biggest deciding factors.
Is there a good primer I can read? I'm mainly looking for resources to then come back here with more detailed questions
I think google app engine is good but I found it rather limited. I could only push my python or java code to it. I decided to go with AWS because I realized, in my specific case, I need other services running and different versions of certain software(some of my apps run python3 and some run python 2.6).
I also found the usage pricing of google a bit confusing. For example, how do I know how many IO requests my system will have? With EC2 I didn't have to measure it, it gives you unlimited IO on your server and to S3. I only pay for an hour.
With that said, there are good reasons to choose google over AWS. If you are simply pushing code and do not depend on any third party services(all the services stem from your own app) then google maybe a good choice.
If someone can provide a good primer than great but I would strongly suggest you just get your feet wet and try both services out. AWS offers a micro instance for free for a year ( http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/ ) and I believe google does as well( http://www.google.com/enterprise/cloud/appengine/pricing.html ). Test both out and see which one you like.
This thread seemed to generate some good discussion and is centered around games:
Final GAE vs AWS architectural decision
Another SO post with lengthy discussion:
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/64727/windows-azure-vs-amazon-ec2-vs-google-app-engine
IBM DeveloperWorks has a nice comparison between major PaaS vendors here.
The main drawback of Google App Engine is the lack of flexibility: it only implements partially the Java EE standard and it forces you to use a Non-Relational data store for persistence (although, Google SQL is planning to get out soon). With this restrictions, your application is less portable.
On the other side, Amazon offers includes a Tomcat Container that it's a fully complaint Java Web Container. Amazon also lets you choose between a relational and a No-SQL repository so flexibility and portability is assured. But the prices are quite expensive, so it’s not recommended for small projects or hobbyist developers (like me)
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Closed 11 years ago.
in the last months the development of mobile apps has become more and more a focus of mine. I already created a few apps with PhoneGap and also dived in into mobile frameworks like jQuery Mobile ans Sencha Touch.
In a next step I would like to use a mobile apps builder and I stumbled on Tiggr and Application Craft. There are probably even more.
So I wanted to ask if some people here already have experience with those two or maybe even another app builder and share it with us. As both seem to cover the same area and I am not so interested in learning them all. I would like to know if someone can tell me which is "better".
I know that there has been a big topic about PhoneGap vs Titanium Appcelerator that helped me a lot so I hope I can get some helpful answers about this topic as well.
Thanks for reading,
Marvin
I have been using Application Craft for about a month (on and off) and so far i'm really impressed. They seem to be putting LOTS of work into it: things have broken only a couple of times, never anything serious. Also, they are building really thorough documentation, etc. they host the apps for free, and they seem to be adding features etc all the time. I would bet that in a year or so they will be huge; quality services on the net tend to grow fast thankfully.
I hadn't heard about Tiggr until now. From what i can see on their site, it looks as though their free service is far inferior to what Application Craft offer. They may be worth a try too?
Hope that helps
I haven't specifically tried Tiggr or ApplicationCraft, but as you've already mentioned there are quite a few different app creation systems out there, all of which work in slightly different ways. Many, for example MobileRoadie or AppBaker, supply a series of pre-built templates that you can customise and plug together in various ways. This is great if their templates support the type of app you want, but there's often no scripting support so if you want something custom you need to pay for their developers to add the features you need, or you should go elsewhere.
If you want complete control over how your app looks and works then you should use a more IDE-like system with built-in scripting support. Things to look out for in such a system would be a good code editor, a way of immediately previewing your app inside the tools, decent documentation, support, and examples. If you're planning a cross-platform app, you'll want a system that can simulate your app running on different phone screen sizes, so you can tune your GUI appropriately.
AppFurnace is a new cloud-based app development platform that provides all of the above (I should point out that I work for AppFurnace, of course).
Tiggr Mobile is a great service! Check out thier tutorials on creating an app that will run on any mobile device at http://blog.gotiggr.com/. They've also received good press and have an impressive gallery of apps that users have created and submitted.
You should probably put NS Basic/App Studio on your list as well. It provides a complete IDE, including a 'drag and drop' interface for adding elements to your forms. The overall feel is something like Visual Studio. You can program in JavaScript or Basic. More info at http://www.nsbasic.com/app.
(disclosure: I work for NS Basic)