A few quick notes if you haven’t picked them up elsewhere:
App Engine is open to everyone now, but still in preview release. They rolled out access to memcache, an image manipulation api and announced an expected pricing structure for resources beyond the free limits (details). In the “fireside chat” they suggested an alternate pricing model for non-profits and education, but with no specifics.
They mentioned a timeline of “by the end of the year” for rolling out billing. It’s worth noting it’s basically the only thing they would attach a timeline to, although their big priorities also seem to be offline processing and alternate language support.
The question whether you will be charged for the size of the indices that are created to service your queries appears to be a strangely touchy issue. The word so far is they would “prefer not to” charge, but it appears this may be a matter of some internal debate?
There don’t seem to be any plans around offering versioned objects. Bigtable can do this, they don’t have the appengine’s tables configured this way. Versions up to the last committed are garbage collected.
While I had hoped to get something out the door with the latest release that was cooler off the bat, it turned out to be a slightly bigger ball of wax than I was willing to wait for at this point. Sonali has been doing some great work thinking through alot of the interfaces and we’ve had some very productive discussions about the initial experince that we want for users. I’m excited about what we ‘re aiming, but it’s going to take a fair bit of rearranging to get there.
The biggest goal is to eliminate (or significantly lower) the barrier to seeing what is special about the site when you arrive. An anonymous user should be able to show up, see some feeds being displayed and immediately get the experience that takes about 4 long boring and meaningless steps to get to currently (sign up, create a jug, add some feeds, add some filters). There should be something on the front page when you show up that is perhaps interesting and that you can immediately start refining without signing up or logging in. We allow you to save the customized thing what you’ve done if you sign up.
Meanwhile, in the non-user-facing realm, I’ve been a bit (okay… maybe more than a bit) distracted from the main line of development trying to absorb what Google App Engine is all about, how much it has to offer to melkjug and how much would need to be done to take advantage of it in a significant way. I’m really excited about it, and I think that certain portions of the application map very well onto what Google is offering. Big props to Ian for appengine-monkey.
In a lot of ways, the changes I put in place to accommodate CouchDb have also payed off in fiddling around with the app engine data api — in terms of managing data, and constraints on finding it, I find them to be deeply similar. (p.s. looks like opencore isn’t alone in hand drawn diagram dept) Put together, CouchDB and App Engine are really starting to shape my concept of what melkjug needs to look like on the inside if it’s going to handle more than a handful of users.
They’re very strange and restrictive environments in some respects, but I think at least some of these constraints are valuable to have right in front of you to prevent you from doing things that just really aren’t going to scale. I’m no expert on doing things in these ways, and I’m certain I’m doing things stupidly, but I think I’m starting to see the light… I’ll post more on this along with some of the prototypes I’m been playing around with at some point soon — poke me if you want them sooner :)
Melkjug 0.2.1 includes many small changes and fixes based on your feedback and introduces a new article picking algorithm that should (hopefully) choose a more satisfying mix of articles.
Give it a try at http://melkjug.com and don’t forget to give feedback!
- Feature #10 export feed set as OPML
- Feature #91 change title of a jug
- Feature #94 Use melkjug with Internet Explorer
- Feature #125 auto-generate or auto-fill jug ‘url’ field
- Feature #131 Choice algorithm should produce a balanced set of articles
- Feature #132 display component feeds on sidebar of feed view
- Feature #147 Display indicator of article loading
- Feature #159 pre-create one jug on signup
- Feature #160 see filter settings on a jug you don’t own
- Fix #96 No error message when adding a feed fails
- Fix #107 dismissed items sometimes blip back into existence momentarily
- Fix #111 Using back button in firefox brings back dismissed articles
- Fix #124 ’shadow jug’ page icon has wrong proportions
- Fix #127 Allow password reset
- Fix #129 Dismiss link at bottom of article
- Fix #149 There should be a url accessable subscription url
- Fix #152 usernames are case sensitive
- Fix #157 title bar displays wrong name
- Fix #158 dynamic page updates are not reflected when back button is hit
- Fix #163 forms are invisible in IE
- Fix #165 javascript does not reload when javascript changes
- Fix #168 Cannot import OPML
- Fix #169 Filtering on age is funky
- Work to address #171 Many jugs are too slow
