As I’ve blogged and written about on various occasions, Google App Engine doesn’t just scale apps: it can also help you assemble them rapidly, using slick tools. Part 2 of “Twitter mining with Objectify-Appengine” wraps up the domain model for a Twitter-mining application, adding hooks for indexing and caching. The article ties everything together with [...]

The notion of the cloud has certainly evolved from some abstract definition of shared resources into a model whereby infrastructures have differentiated themselves from platforms. That is, while one might group Amazon and Google into cloud providers, their solutions are vastly different. AWS remains an infrastructure as a service while GAE is a platform as a service.

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The notion of the cloud has certainly evolved from some abstract definition of shared resources into a model whereby infrastructures have differentiated themselves from platforms. That is, while one might group Amazon and Google into cloud providers, their solutions are vastly different. AWS remains an infrastructure as a service while GAE is a platform as [...]

I recently had the pleasure of catching up with my old friend, Ted Neward. As anyone who has ever had the occasion of inquiring into Ted’s opinions knows, Mr. Neward is a veritable fire hose of technical knowledge intermixed with random thoughts, name dropping, and rants, all of which makes a conversation with Ted unpredictable, and yet, a lot of fun.

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I recently had the pleasure of catching up with my old friend, Ted Neward. As anyone who has ever had the occasion of inquiring into Ted’s opinions knows, Mr. Neward is a veritable fire hose of technical knowledge intermixed with random thoughts, name dropping, and rants, all of which makes a conversation with Ted unpredictable, [...]

But there is one slight issue with NoSQL. You can’t use SQL.

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But there is one slight issue with NoSQL. You can’t use SQL. This is, unfortunately for the time being, a non-starter in certain business domains. For instance, I recently designed a data mart for a large financial services company. A non-relational, schema-less datastore made a lot of sense here — the client wanted extreme flexibly [...]

Google’s datastore, known as Bigtable, is a column-oriented NoSQL datastore that is accessible via Google App Engine. Rather than the schemas you’d find in a relational database, Bigtable is basically a massively distributed persistence map — one that permits queries on keys and attributes of the underlying data values. Working with the datastore is vastly different than what you’ve probably grown accustomed to with traditional relational systems.

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Google’s datastore, known as Bigtable, is a column-oriented NoSQL datastore that is accessible via Google App Engine. Rather than the schemas you’d find in a relational database, Bigtable is basically a massively distributed persistence map — one that permits queries on keys and attributes of the underlying data values. Working with the datastore is vastly [...]

JSON has arguably become the new lingua franca of the Internet; that is, JSON has become preferable for browser to server communication — over that of XML, which, as it happens, is quite verbose. JSON’s lightweight-ness makes it easily readable and easy to parse.

For example, in the case of a Retweet object (which represents a Twitter retweet), I can represent it easily enough in JSON like so:

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