Software Developers Forum
23 Sept 2009
Cubberly Community Center, Palo Alto

Neal Goldstein is the author of “IPhone Application Development for Dummies”
I have found that these “for Dummies” books are not correct nor useful, but Goldstein seemed to know his stuff and explain it well.

I teach and recommend the use of Google App Engine, a free service provided to web application developers. Goldstein expressed extreme dissatisfaction with Google’s service level agreement provided for App Engine, which may keep businesses from making use of App Engine.

He had some useful ways of explaining some of the concepts that I teach:

1) Frameworks: “You don’t use a framwork, it uses you.” This is true because as developers, we must fit our work into an existing framework, in exactly the position that the framework expects it to go. So in order to take advantage of a framework, we have to learn its structure and expectations and adhere to them precisely.

2) Model/View/Controller: The analogy goes like this
TV screen is the View, it doesn’t care what is being sent to it, it just puts it on the screen.
Cable box or antenna is the Controller, it just sends the programming to the TV.
The program that you watch is the Model, it contains the content you asked for.

3) Subclassing: To subclass another class is like taking a deuce coupe and turning it into a hot rod, except you still have the deuce coups to use when you want to.

For me to study:
Delegation in OOP – Goldstein says it is like composition, though I think it is more like Interface. He says it is probably more important then inheritance.

Silicon Valley Web Developer Java Users Group
16 September 2009, Googleplex

Socialwok is a social networking site, FaceBook for people who are currently work together. People from SocialWok told us about how they made their product, the largest application running on Google’s App Engine with Java.

SocialWok was able to develop the whole app in Java, the back end running on App Engine and the front end Java code they compiled into JavaScript using Google Web Toolkit. They said it was a big advantage being able to use just one language for an entire Web application. Starting development in May, their four engineers had an impressive array of features running now, only 4 months later.

Then Max Ross talked about “The Softer Side of Schemas”
He was referring to Google’s Datastore, which is NOT relational.
Google has made up their own database model, where the constraints to the data are enforced purely in the application layer. Max said that the data model is hierarchical, but I’m sure it is more then that. I will have to study it further!

To study:
Google Data API’s (GDATA)
JDO and JPA

To test:
Editing a Google doc while offline. This should show me how Google Gears works.