gwt-fireworks-demo

Recently I worked on some code for the Google IO Last Call Contest.

I started coding on a Friday afternoon after a long day's work in which I had started early at 3:30am to do some load testing. I finished up around 1:30am Saturday morning.

Basically the objective was to use GWT 2.2 and its recent support for the HTML5 canvas. The problem was to replicate in some creative way the behavior of the Google IO 2011 landing page.

My project is hosted on App Engine.

I am hosting the project on Google Code.

Google App Engine and Python

I'm setting out to learn Python and Django in order to make some use of Google App Engine. I spent an hour yesterday working through the helloworld sample that results in a reasonable guest book application. I don't want to sound like an ad for Google but there are many compleing reasons to give this technology a try. The specific reason that interests me at this stage is the ability to take an idea for a site and actually have someplace to host it for free. Maybe there are other offerings similar to this?

The only feedback I have so far is that editing just an html template does not cause the page to be reloaded by the Python server. At least this is the case for me on OS X 10.4. Maybe it works differently on Leopard? Instead making a change to the .py class file does cause the html to be refreshed.

Also, I don't know any Python yet! Java clouds my vision for now.