Aptana Cloud: Develop locally, sync to the cloud
Posted by James | Filed under Code, Web
Aptana have announced their cloud platform initiative, Aptana Cloud.
Aptana Cloud plugs right into your IDE to provide instant deployment, smart synchronisation, and seamless migration as you scale. Aptana Cloud is ideal for developers who use scripting languages to create Ajax, Facebook, MySpace and all other sorts of web applications.
The key is that this isn’t an infrastructure play, which they clearly point out:
Aptana Cloud is architected to complement Cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon, Google, Joyent and others. To get started we’ve selected Joyent who serves up some of the largest of all Facebook apps.
This shows that their platform is designed to go meta, allowing you to deploy to various clouds in the future.
With Aptana Cloud we will see sophisticated tools to make us productive in the cloud. I am very excited to see that it won’t be too long until developers will be able to build an application, hit DEPLOY, and be done. This is a huge win.
For developers:
- IDE plug-in integrates Cloud development, deployment and management life-cycles right into Aptana Studio in either its standalone or Eclipse based editions.
- Instant deployment of projects to Cloud.
- One-click sync your project to the Cloud, or provide fine-grained sync control too.
- Integrated service management consoles.
- Configure desired memory size and disk size.
- Develop and instantly preview remote files right inside your Studio desktop environment.
- Subversion source control.
I was pleased to read that not only Ruby on Rails, but Python is on the docket. After developing Django applications and playing with Google App Engine, I would love to be able to use Studio for Python code too.
Aptana adds extra value via IDE integration, deployment automation and active monitoring and notification services. It’s like the ease and simplicity between iTunes on your desktop and its connectivity to services on the Web.
For developers, the IDE plug-in integrates cloud development, deployment and management lifecycles right into Aptana Studio in either its standalone or Eclipse based editions. The ability to deploy stuff to the cloud from Eclipse is part of this as well.
Other developer features include instant deployment of projects to the cloud; one click can sync your project to the cloud or provide fine-grained sync control; the technology features integrated cloud services management, enables users to provision their cloud right from Aptana Studio, configure desired memory size and disk size, develop and instantly preview remote files right inside Aptana Studio, and includes Subversion source control.
Can’t wait to get an invite. If you want one too, request an account.
On a related note, Aptana Studio just passed 1.5 million downloads!
Tags: aptana, cloud, cloud computing, development, programming
OpenSocial 0.7 Released
Posted by James | Filed under Code, Geek, Social, Web
The latest version of the OpenSocial spec has been released, 0.7:
The best news is that, based on numerous discussions with both app developers as well as container sites, we believe OpenSocial 0.7 has all the necessary pieces to launch OpenSocial apps to users at scale. In fact, both hi5 and orkut will be using OpenSocial 0.7 for their upcoming user-facing launches.
There are two major pieces to this release:
Updating OpenSocial
The OpenSocial APIs have been upgraded:
- Standardised profile information fields. The release adds a slew of standard fields that you can access about a Person. There include location, schools, pets, movies, sports, and more. However, keep in mind that a container may not have all of this information available so your application should always check first by using the supportsField method.
- Support for viral growth. Two new methods allow your application to send messages on behalf of a user. You can invite a user’s friends to install your application with the requestShareApp method. You can also send an application-specific message with the requestSendMessage method. Both of these methods require the user sending the message to authorise the request first.
- Activity templates. You can now define activity messages with placeholders for pieces of application or user data. This separation of data and presentation allows multiple activities to be combined into activity summaries — consolidated bundles of activities that let users know what their friends are up to without having to wade through a flood of messages. For example, instead of seeing five new updates about friends that installed a new application, you would see one update that says five of your friends added the application. For details on how to use activity templates in your application, see opensocial.Activity in the OpenSocial API reference.
- Simplified persistence API. Support for global and instance-scoped application data has been removed from the API. Global application data can be implemented using feeds (that can be prefetched for performance) and other web standards. Instance-scoped application data can be implemented on top of user-scoped data by including the module ID of the application in the key.
Gadgets Open Sourced
As promised, the full Gadgets engine has been open sourced:
As part of the Apache Shindig project, gadgets have been open sourced. The new Gadgets Specification defines the gadgets.* JavaScript namespace where you’ll find that some of your favourite methods from the Gadgets API have been re-namespaced into a cleaner API for your convenience and clarity. For example, _IG_Adjust_IFrame_Height is now available as gadgets.window.adjustHeight
Tags: api, opensocial, programming, update, Web
OpenSocial: Social Javascript
Posted by James | Filed under Code, Geek, Web
This is a site about technology for developers, so I won’t get into any politics on OpenSocial and Facebook. There is already more coverage on that than you could want to read.
How is a social API interesting to Ajax developers? The main interface to the social data is through JavaScript. You can also use REST to hit the endpoints themselves, but the JavaScript API is very much the first class citizen.
If you are used to the Google Gadgets API you will probably be most familiar. Social components just have to include a one liner to their ModulePrefs:
This tells the container that you will be doing social tasks. There are three main APIs that you now have access too:
- People Data API: You can get access to owners and viewers, and their friends
- Persistence Data API: Store simple hash table data for the users using your application
- Activities Data API: Like the Facebook News feed
You will probably want to grab some social data which requires you to setup a request and grab data:
When you want to work with user data such as preferences, you will use the storage api. Here is an example from WoShamBo:
Tags: api, Code, google, javascript, opensocial, programming, Social
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