Adam Crossland's Blog

May 10, 2009

I have been working with Google's AppEngine since its first day of release. Their vision was instantly compelling, and the birth of Microsoft's Azure platform only increased my feeling that even in its infancy, cloud computing is the best way for web entrepreneurs to create their businesses. These platforms give us a way to develop and deploy applications with two compelling advantages over alternative hosting options: low cost of entry and effortless scaling to accommodate success.

Over the past week, I completed some work for a client that showed me another important facet of the cloud computing revolution: services in the cloud. These are web services that can provide absolutely critical infrastructure points to enable the success of small, incipient web-based businesses.

In particular, I was working with Amazon Flexible Payment Service, creating a Python library to enable its use from within an AppEngine application. It is a beautiful, wonderfully-designed product, and working with it was a joy. It was readily apparent to me that any business could use it to quickly and almost effortlessly take care of their billing needs with very little middle-man overhead.

While I was investigating FPS, I took a look at the other AWS products. Everyone knows about EC2 and S3, both of which are integral parts of many exciting new web ventures, but I was surprised and delighted to discover CloudFront, a pay-as-you-go Content Delivery Network and DevPay, a way for developers not only to bill users for provided services but also to pay for the Amazon Web Services products that they utilize to provide the service in their first place. There you have two huge obstacles to success and growth accounted for. CloudFront enables you to deliver your static content at very low cost and minimal effort; DevPay provides for the management and collection of subscriptions or other fees while removing the step of getting billed by Amazon for the EC2, S3, SimpleDB, CloudFront or whatever other products are being used. Brilliant.

Over the coming days and weeks, I'm going to be writing a lot more about these and other services that enable entrepreneurs and small businesses to succeed on the web. I can scarcely contain my excitement at what I see as an explosion of new technologies that -- if used synergistically -- could completely reshape the way that businesses are created and run.

December 31, 2008

Go ahead and check out the amazing new thing before every one else does:

Oslo

Of all of the things to pour forth from the Microsoft Technology Firehose, it is the one that has completely captivated me. It is going to be huge. It smells like one of the things that comes around every decade or so that can completely change the IT industry and the way the software engineers work.

That could be scary, but Oslo is just so cool...it's hard to imagine even the most clench-jawed, steaming-mad Slashdotter disliking it. I'm sure, however, that they will rise to the occasion.

And more important than any technology nonsense, my best, most sincere wishes to you and yours for a happy, prosperous and fun New Year.

December 19, 2008

Sluggable-mixin

I've extracted the slug-related code from this blogging software and packaged it so that it should be easily-portable to any Google AppEngine application. I hope that it will be useful for anyone who needs to add nice human and search engine-friendly URLs to their app. It works like and is similar in spirit to my previously-released AppEngine mixin, taggable-mixin.

I'd like to encourage anyone who finds this useful -- or any who finds it to be a useless atrocity -- to leave questions, suggestions and feedback here. I will answer as quickly as I can.