Brian Seeders

I finally updated mobile yesterday.. I completely re-designed the interface (screenshots on the project page) and ported the whole thing over to Google App Engine. GAE is awesome to work with and I definitely recommend it if you’re looking for something new to play with, especially if you like Python. You can give me a holler if you need help getting started.

The great thing about using GAE is that mobile will get performance and reliability boosts. Mobile was hosted on a server sitting in my common room. It has great uptime, but I’m sure Google’s uptime is far superior. It will also scale to a huge number of users now, not that it looks like that will ever be a problem. Based on my Analytics reports, it looks like very few people are using the site, which is sad.

The bad thing about using GAE is that mobile.case.edu can’t be the URL anymore. This isn’t a problem with GAE; all you need is a CNAME set up to get it to work. I ask ITS about it, but they denied my request without a reason. mobile.case.edu simply re-directs to mocwru.appspot.com, which is the URL you should use for bookmarks, just in case the server hosting mobile.case.edu is down.

The other issue with having to use the appspot URL is that there’s some kind of weird referrer bug or something with Scheduler that will cause an infinite re-direct loop, so I have to host that on the mobile.case.edu machine as well. I told the owner of Scheduler about it, but he said he couldn’t reproduce it.

Hopefully, over the course of the week, I’ll see a spike in usage and it’ll give me the motivation to actually do more updates.

A side note to potentially confused Facebook users: This blog is synced from my website.