App Engine Hello Jose!

For this, our final homework, all you need to do is implement and deploy a simple google app engine application. The application needs to do two simple things:

1. When someone visits http://yourwebsite.appspot.com they should see your name.
2. When someone visits http://yourwebsite.appspot.com/bye they should see "Good bye".

Google App Engine Introduction

We will finish the class this semester by learning a little bit about the Google App Engine. The app engine is a hosting service provided by Google. You write web applications using Java or Python in your local machine and then copy them over to google for hosting. An important advantage of this method is that Google will take care of scaling up your application so that, whether you have 10 or 10 million users, you don't have to do anything differently. This is also useful if your site ever appears on one of the popular new aggregators (digg.com).

To get started you should watch the video below by Wednesday, April 15:

The read the documentation.

JSONPing Flickr

For today's exercise you will write a webpage with javascript ajax call to flickr that will retrieve the data for their currently interesting public photos and display these to the user.

You should start by examining how I did a very similar thing, but with delicious, in this slide. Then you will want to vist the flickr API, especially their REST request and response pages, and their JSON response format page (especially towards the end). You might also need to re-familiarize yourself with the jQuery ajax function, especially its dataType and jsonp options.

Finally, if you don't want to create a flickr account, you can use this key: b13a756540df31453ad014e399056af6.

REST Introduction

The next lecture is a quick overview of REST (Representation State Transfer) which is a simple way to structure APIs for your web services. Here are the slides for the REST talk. This is just a quick introduction. If you want to delve deeper into the philosophy of REST, I highly recommend you read RESTful web services. In the video I also talk about JSONP which doesn't really have anything to do with REST but it kinda fits in with the delicious examples I use.

You have to watch this video by Wednesday, April 8. Also, I remind you that there is no class on Monday, April 6.

REST from Jose Vidal on Vimeo.

Get the Gears Going

Today's exercise is to do the gears tutorial. You must show me that you have an offline-capable site by the end of class. Remember the instructions I gave for installing gears on Iceweasel on the lab machines.