Software, Cycling

AppHarbor and Heroku Pricing

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:41:00 -0500

Last year, I wrote a little about my first experience with AppHarbor building a small prototype website. The experience was great, and I was excited to see a free PaaS offering for the .NET stack (especially since C# / MVC3 is my primary development platform at work.)

A few months later, I rewrote the site in Rails on Heroku, to get a little more experience with Rails. Both experiences were similar, both platforms offered the similar features (Web Server, Database, Custom Host Names) for free, the only real difference being platform maturity and server-side technologies.

The beauty of these platforms is that they provide the infrastructure for hobbyists to publish websites for free, with a seamless, future-proof ability to scale.

Yesterday AppHarbor announced a new pricing structure which includes an official free tier called “Canoe.” One aspect of the pricing that I think caught a lot of people’s attention is this:

If you are happy with the Canoe plan and just need custom hostnames or SNI SSL, those can be added a la carte for $10/month.

To me, this is rather disappointing. Most of what I do outside of work is not for profit… I play with new technologies, make small websites for friends, and once in a while I prototype applications for businesses that aren’t ready to make the leap to a paid solution. If I have a host name to use on one of those projects, it would be nice not to have to pay $120/year to do it…

My two cents, keep custom hostnames free, focus on continuing to build out scalability features, and then target revenue from large companies like heroku.

PS: I still highly recommend both Heroku and AppHabor!

Grassroots Policy

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 17:06:39 -0400

Grassroots Policy:

GrassrootsPolicy.com is a website I’ve been working on in Ruby on Rails, hosted on Heroku. The idea of the site is that users post, vote, and comment on political ideas. If you feel passionate about an idea you can share the link with your friends, and encourage them to provide feedback and vote on the issue. Top ideas might get the attention of elected officials who can do something about it.

So far, Rails has made a few features easy…

User registration and login is implemented with gem ‘devise’
Threaded comments are implemented with gem ‘awesome_nested_set’ and rails partial views.
jQuery and jQuery UI are used in a lot of the default templates, tabs, and ajax postbacks for commenting, voting, and posting new ideas.

I’ve got a handful of features to implement, which I should probably start to manage on trello.com… but for now please Register, Vote, Comment and post your own Ideas!

PS, the code is messy, but if you feel like taking a look its out on github.com/recalde/grassroots.

Salesforce showFilePreview

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 10:31:00 -0400

Salesforce showFilePreview:

Here’s a code snippet showing how to use the Chatter file-preview dialog from a Visualforce page.

Bicycle Tour of Colorado

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 13:04:00 -0400

Bicycle Tour of Colorado:

Facebook photo album from the Bicycle Tour of Colorado

jQuery Grid Sample

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 15:25:00 -0400

jQuery Grid Sample:

Another code sample to demonstrate the new jQuery Grid (pre1.9) widget on the Force.com platform. This sample hooks up paging and selecting.

References
- Salesforce AJAX Toolkit
- jQuery UI Grid (Github)
- jQuery UI Grid Planning & Development Wiki

jQuery Template Sample

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 15:19:00 -0400

jQuery Template Sample:

This code sample demonstrates how to use jQuery Template Plugin on the Force.com platform. This sample uses a SOQL query to select user data. The rendered template is switched onclick to an editable row. The updates are then persisted back to salesforce using the .update() javascript method.

References
- Salesforce AJAX Toolkit
- jQuery Templates (Github)

Silverlight on Windows 8

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 11:20:24 -0400

Silverlight on Windows 8:

I like that Microsoft is elevating HTML/Javascript, but I generally disagree that Windows 8 is signalling an end to silverlight… this article includes some supporting evidence that Silverlight hasn’t been abandoned, yet.

Note: this is not an endorsement of Silverlight as a development platform for large complex applications.

2011 Trek Madone 6.9 SSL dream bike built up at Manchester Cycle...

Sun, 22 May 2011 11:36:00 -0400

2011 Trek Madone 6.9 SSL dream bike built up at Manchester Cycle Shop. The Mad Fiber wheels aren’t mine, yet, but the do look pretty sweet don’t they? Weight as pictured: 12lbs 14oz.

SRAM Red 2011 (Black)
Race XXX Lite Carbon Stem
Race XXX Lite Carbon Handlebars
Bontrager inForm RXL Saddle
Bontrager Node2 Computer
Look Keo Classic Pedals
Reynolds DV-46T Tubular Wheelset
Bontrager Race XXX Lite Tubular Tires

Advice to a New Programmer

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 11:17:18 -0400

Advice to a New Programmer:

Nice article from Ted Neward in response to the question “I’m a new programmer, having moved over after 20 years as a systems guy. What do you wish somebody had taught you back when you were new?”

2007 Cannondale CAAD9 purchased as a complete bike with Shimano...

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:19:00 -0400

2007 Cannondale CAAD9 purchased as a complete bike with Shimano 105 on craigslist in 2008, and eventually swapped out everything but the original frame. It will probably become a dedicated hillclimb bike in preparation for the 2011 Mt. Washington Auto Road Bicycle Hillclimb.

SRAM Force 2010 (Levers, Brakes, Front/Rear Derailleur)
Shimano DuraAce 7800 (Crankset, Chain, Cassette)
Easton EC-90 SLX Fork
Bontrager Race XXX Lite Stem
Bontrager Race XXX Lite Seatpost
Bontrager Race Lite Handlebars
Bontrager inform R Saddle
Look Keo Classic Pedals
Reynolds DV-46T Tubular Wheelset
Bontrager Race XXX Lite Tubular Tires

AppHarbor PaaS Hosting

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 11:06:00 -0400

I just started working on a little proof-of-concept web app on AppHarbor (last night), which is an MVC3 PaaS similar to Heroku, except for .NET.

So far I’m really impressed, and would recommend it to anyone as a development platform (still need to find out where it stands as a production environment…)

Here’s what I have in place so far (~3 hours of work)

AspNetMembershipProvider on an AppHarbor 20mb SqlServer Instance.
DotNetOpenAuth for OpenID authentication, integrated with AspNetMembership.
ELMAH 1.1 – Error logging module.
Entity Framework 4.1 RC – “Magic Unicorn”, Code-First Table-Per-Type (TPT)
Microsoft’s CDN for jQuery, jQueryUI, jQueryUI CSS, jQuery Templates
VisualStudio Unit-Test Framework - AppHarbor will execute all your unit tests prior to deploying code!
GIT – Local repository, with a Git push to AppHarbor to build/test/deploy code.

For just a few hours, that’s a pretty rich base to build an application on. I haven’t implemented any front-end yet… but I’m looking forward to using some jQuery, JSON, and jQuery Templates!

Here’s the website: http://grassrootspolicy.com/

2008 Schwinn Madison with a few after-market parts to make her a...

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 18:53:00 -0400

2008 Schwinn Madison with a few after-market parts to make her a bit prettier:

Developing on Salesforce

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 16:51:00 -0400

I’ve had a healthy amount of exposure to the Salesforce.com platform from an integration standpoint, and I’ve done some tinkering with the web front-end and eclipse IDE in the past, but recently I’ve been involved in a project that’s going to be developed directly on the SFDC platform. Here are some of my initial thoughts on it…

The Good

Data-modelling is extremely easy. The data-model and API are extended rather elegantly. Adding custom objects, custom fields, relationships can be done right through the web front-end. I need to do a little digging to understand how their migrations are handled, but so far so good.
The development pattern is straight forward MVC, and there’s a rich set of apex controls at your disposal, saving you the trouble of writing HTML for straight-forward user interfaces.
The SOAP API, although pretty complex, is very flexible, and automatically includes customizations you’ve made. (Caveat: login and queryMore can be a little tricky to figure out if you’re using a language that doesn’t have a pre-packaged wrapper ie: C#).
SOQL (Salesforce Object Query Language) is pretty neat way of filtering data and results.
The Spring ‘11 release includes Javascript Remoting which generates javascript wrappers for your apex methods by simply adding @RemoteAction attribute to the method. I’m a huge fan of the jQuery Template project, and look forward to leveraging it for this project.

The Bad

I’m scared of “platform lock-in.” John Mill’s post on the subject outlines some of the fears I have, but I think the counterargument used is a little optimistic. Developing in the cloud isn’t realistically 5x faster than traditional development, especially when you start putting processes in place.
Process: it just doesn’t feel like we have much of it. There is a trade-off to bypassing traditional IT gating processes and controls…
Currently we’re only using source control for release-ready code, not development. I’m a big fan of TFS-style change sets with check-in comments, and merging code.
Not a huge fan of a using a custom language (apex) however, this isn’t a huge setback as its fairly similar to Java. I just wish it had a little C# functional flair.
There’s no out-of-the-box CDN for jQuery, jQuery UI, and no pre-packaged CSS that mimics the salesforce look and feel. I can’t see how this would be too difficult to add. Microsoft and Google figured it out.

Overall Impressions

I’m continually impressed by the SFDC platform, and I’m pretty excited about this project. I look forward to sharing some more thoughts once I get my hands dirty…

jQuery Combobox

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 08:51:00 -0500

Jörn Zaefferer writes a good summary about creating a jQuery Widget: A jQuery UI Combobox: Under the hood, which was the basis of this official autocomplete demo.

Some customizations I made from here include:

Automatically open menu on focus-in, which can also allowed for removal of the button (this needs a little UX feedback from our customers.)
Add an afterchange event whenever the selected value changes, useful for further client validation.
Remove default menu-item filtering by overriding the source callback to always show all options.
Select the first element that currently matches typed text, previous behavior was to bold the text, but leave it to the user to cursor down or mouse click.

After that a little extra css controls max-height with scrolling and font-size.

- Rob

1/26/2011 Update

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 19:37:09 -0500

The majority of my work the last few weeks has been HTML + JQuery + JSON… once work calms down a bit, these are some things I want to share:

Extending an html select with a jquery autocomplete widget, including some UX considerations.
Using Jquery $.data() to tag data to a DOM element.
Reposting JSON data to a server, after it was rendered with jQuery Templates.
Updating a jQuery Template by updating its underlying JSON data, its easy, and you should use it to save on expensive postbacks.

Have fun in the snow.

MVC3 Gotcha: JSON Date Formatting

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 16:47:45 -0500

When returning a JsonResult with MVC3 dates are a little “non-standard”.

“ModifiedDate”:”\/Date(1291157061223)\/”

Here’s a solution:

function formatDate(jsonDate) {
var date = new Date(parseInt(jsonDate.substr(6)))
return date.toLocaleDateString();
}

And, an example with jQuery Templates:

<script id=”tableRowTemplate” type=”text/x-jquery-tmpl”>
   <tr>
   …
   <td>
   ${formatDate(ModifiedDate)}
   </td>
   </tr>
</script>

Tip: stringify your cookies

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 16:35:35 -0500

This simple example shows how you can stringify a simple array to store search history in a cookie, but the same principle can be used for complex data too.

The sample uses json2.js and jquery.cookie.js.

function getSearchHistory() {
   // Get Search History from Cookie
   var history = $.cookie(‘searchHistory’);
   if (history == null)
   return [];
   else
   return JSON.parse(history);
}

function addSearchCookie(searchValue) {
   // Get Search History
   var history = getSearchHistory();
   // Add Search Term
   if (!containsValue(history, searchValue))
   {
   history.push(searchValue);
    // Set Cookie
   $.cookie(‘searchHistory’, JSON.stringify(history), { path: ‘/’ });
   }
}

Just to finish it off, you can use this search history in an auto-complete with this code.

// Add Auto-Complete
$search.autocomplete({
source: getSearchHistory()
});

Thanks for reading.

JSON postbacks with MVC

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 16:24:00 -0500

Complex JSON post data was possible with MVC2, but it comes out of the box with MVC3, and it couldn’t be much easier. This code sample should sum it all up, you’ll just need the json2.js library, which gives you JSON.stringify(), and JSON.parse().

Controller:

[HttpPost]
public JsonResult RenameAction(string opportunityId, RenameProposalModel model)
{
proposalService.RenameProposal(opportunityId, Identity.UserName, model);
return Json(model);
}

Javascript:

function renameProposal() {
   var dialog = $(‘#renameDialog’);
   var proposalName = dialog.find(‘#ProposalName’);
   var proposalJson = $.tmplItem(proposalName).data;
   var postData = JSON.stringify({
   QuoteID: proposalJson.QuoteID,
   ProposalID: proposalJson.ID,
   ProposalName: proposalName.val()
   });
   // Post to server
   $.ajax({
   type: ‘post’,
   url: $renameUrl,
   contentType: ‘application/json; charset=utf-8’,
   data: postData,
   dataType: ‘json’,
   success: renameProposalSuccess, // reloads section
   error: ajaxErrorDelegate // display raw error message
   });
};

Some notes about this code, it gets the original data (which was rendered with jquery templates) back using the html element reference, no need for hidden fields! Other than that, pretty standard.

My Tracks for Android

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 10:23:00 -0500

My Tracks for Android:

Google staffers put together this handy, open source, GPS app for cycling. I used this on a couple dozen rides with my Droid X this fall. Highly recommended! Take a look at the code if you’re curious how to put together an Android app in Java with the eclipse IDE.

This Developer's Life: Scars

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 08:32:00 -0500

This Developer's Life: Scars:

New podcast about cancelled projects. Should be an interesting listen for some folks I work with ;)