Self Debugging

I recently heard about an interesting user group that I should’ve known about earlier. The SV Google Technology User Group meets once a month at the Googleplex in Mountain View to discuss the latest from Google.

At the last meetup on Wednesday Ryan Barrett from the App Engine team talked about recent updates and ideas they’re thinking about. The most interesting for me was the idea of a local library that allows me to run a script locally to access my data on the Data Store through a REST API. That would make it easier to do things like making global updates to the data store or pulling everything to a local database for advanced reporting. Not that it can’t be done today, but a library from Google would standardize that and open the door for developers to write scripts that can work with any app engine application with little or no changes.

The main presentation was about SproutCore, a JavaScript framework that feels a lot like Ruby on Rails. It supports an MVC model, data bindings, automatic packing of JS files, and a big library of UI components. My view is that it has a great potential, especially with the continuing trend of pushing more functionality to the client side. But it’s still in it’s early days, and some developers, myself included, might have reservations about the lack of support for IE 6 in the current offering. But definitely something to keep an eye on.

Van Riper, the SV-GTUG Lead, was also kind enough to let me do a lightning talk bout some of the work that my startup is doing on the App Engine, especially BitPixels, a website thumbnail service, that we’re using to serve about 5 million thumbnails a month. We store all the thumbnails in the data store and serve them off of Google’s infrastructure, which is working great for us.

Pictures from the meetup here.