Building Blocks

As far as I can see there is no mention of startup performance. Doesn’t have to mean they haven’t worked on it. Ill check it out to night to see how the application behaves.

I got this on twitter last night. Google is doing a prerelease of the next AppEngine SDK.

Details can be found here:

http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-java/browse_thread/thread/fe334c9e461026fa

Only thing that worries me is that there is no mention of application startup times.

Regarding the logging issue with Grails and Google AppEngine, I’ve just installed the latest build of Grails1.2 and deployed to AppEngine, and it works.

No change to the loading time of grails however, I’m still getting timeouts on my initial requests.

The issue with the AppEngine enhancer still exists with Windows 7. Let’s hope for the next version of Windows then…

A friend of mine invited me to Google Wave just yesterday. The same night Google invited me as well. I’m hoping its just a bonus email and not a wasted invite

I’m struggling with an issue where Google AppEngine will take over 30 seconds to do the initial loading of my hosted web-application. Now apparently it does take a while to load applications that rely on allot of different jar files. Which mine naturally does.

There are however some rumors on the AppEngine group that they are looking to improve the loading time of the applications. Here is a link to one of the discussions. Now this  is just one, I’ve seen others where similar statements have been made.

Now I’m looking forward to get the speed up on my application. Especially if I don’t have to do much about it. However there are some tips out there, due to my lack of computer at the moment I haven’t tested the recommendations but in the thread called: startup takes forver “stumpy” has a few recommendations to improve the start time for Google AppEngine for Java.

Today they released a new version of the SDK for Google AppEngine.

Personally I’m very excited about the ability to recieve email.

Here is a link to the Java release notes. The blog post at Google only links to the python release notes.

http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/wiki/SdkForJavaReleaseNotes

The Google Wave beta program rolled out a bunch of Beta invitations lately. I discussed this with a friend, the marketing value of an invitation model for software.

GMail started as an invitation, most people I know started using GMail as they were invited by others. I my self started with GMail after a friend evangelized the interface.

I believe that Google hopes to apply the same marketing model to Google Wave, and as far as I know they will succeed with it as well.

Now lets consider the benefits.

• They can build hype, but still release the product early for feedback
• They can scale slowly, making sure the system can handle the load as the user base grows
• They can target specific users for invitations, say 20% targets students, 20% targets media, and then som distributions between web browsers and operative systems

Now the targeting of users is interesting. This part is just hypothesis, but in theory they could use search to look up people. For example, they could find people on Facebook and see what kind of friends they have, even interests for example. They can check out whom follows who on twitter. All in all, they can in theory data mine the net to target out specific users whom will fill the role for Marketing, Feedback and Development.

I upgraded this morning, figuring that the changes related to the .gsp views and their pre-compiling would reduce the cold start issues I’m having with Google AppEngine.

However the 1.2-M2 release of Grails, doesn’t fly on Google AppEngine right now. As far as I can see on the mailing list others have had this issue as well.

The problem I’m experiencing is that the LogManager cannot instantiate.

Context initialization failed
org.springframework.beans.factory.access.BootstrapException: Error executing bootstraps; nested exception is org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.InvokerInvocationException: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: java.util.logging.LogManager is a restricted class. Please see the Google App Engine developer's guide for more details.
	at org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.context.GrailsContextLoader.createWebApplicationContext(GrailsContextLoader.java:74)
	at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader.initWebApplicationContext(ContextLoader.java:197)
	at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener.contextInitialized(ContextLoaderListener.java:47)
	at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.ContextHandler.startContext(ContextHandler.java:530)

And

Context initialization failed
org.springframework.beans.factory.access.BootstrapException: Error executing bootstraps; nested exception is org.codehaus.groovy.runtime.InvokerInvocationException: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class com.google.apphosting.runtime.security.shared.stub.java.util.logging.LogManager

Update: Chad has created a JIRA for this issue located here:http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/GRAILSPLUGINS-1546

Also here is a link to the discussion on the Grails thread:

http://www.nabble.com/java.util.logging.LogManager-is-a-restricted-class.-Please-see-the–Google-App-Engine-developer%27s-guide-for-more-details.-td25453128.html

I’ve been having this issue for a while. Putting it off, but now I had to get my hands dirty. The findBy… methods weren’t returning any objects even though there were data fitting the specified values.

So tonight I finally took the time to take a look at it. My theory was that I could figure out what was wrong by reading the code in JpaPluginSupport.groovy, located in the GORM-JPA plugin.

Now I didn’t find out why its not working. It even looks like its not supported, but I can’t say for sure. What I did however, was find a workaround.

Instead of doing

User.findByEmail(newSaga.email)

I do

User.findWhere(email: newSaga.email)

Using the findWhere method I get results. This is the workaround I’ll go for for now.