Snow Sprint wrap-up, and introducing Tweet Engine
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under python, coding, tweet-engine, tech, snow-sprint
It's Friday evening, which means the Snow Sprint is wrapping up, and everyone's presenting their App Engine apps. There's some pretty impressive work been done in a mere 5 days...
Tweet Engine
First up is us! Myself, Jens Klein, and Sasha Vincic teamed up to write Tweet Engine, a twitter webapp for collaborative tweeting. Many organisations - both companies and open source groups - have shared twitter accounts. Using these shared accounts, however, can be a huge pain, especially if you have multiple accounts to manage. The goal of Tweet Engine is to make this more manageable.
Anyone can sign up by logging in with their Google account. Once signed up, you can add any number of Twitter accounts. We use the Twitter OAuth library, which allows us to obtain permission from a user without prompting you for your password.
Once you've added an account, you can give any number of other people permission to use it. Access is configurable, including full administrator access, just the ability to send and view tweets, or just the ability to suggest tweets for review and approval. Once a suggestion is submitted, anyone with sufficient permissions can approve or decline it. Scheduled tweeting is also supported, for both regular tweets and those that require approval - simply specify the date and time you want it published at.
We also support XMPP: Simply add account_name@tweet-engine.appspotchat.com to your XMPP list, and send tweets to it - they'll be sent immediately. Finally, thanks to Jens' recent efforts, Tweet Engine is also internationalized, in English and German (so far)!
Tweet Engine is, of course, OSS - the entire source is available on GitHub, here. Feel free to fork, download and deploy as you wish. If you implement something cool, don't forget to let us know!
Still on the drawing board:
- More documentation - about pages, help pages, and so forth.
- Email notifications of tweets waiting to be reviewed.
- A page that summarizes all the accounts you have.
- Much much more...
If you feel inspired, feel free to help out with these, too. Or if you just have an idea, file a bug.
gaelogger
Next up was gaelogger, an App Engine logging application. It has a sophisticated web-based interface, allowing filtering and viewing of logs, but its main functionality is as a programmatic logging service. Users can register clients, obtaining a client key, which allows them to log events to the service. The API uses JSONRPC, and supports both individual and batch logging, in addition to querying the logs.
Other users can do live queries in a 'tail -f' fashion, or subscribe to event notifications, receiving notifications via XMPP or email, setting filter criteria to specify what they want to be notified of. The notification service makes use of the Task Queue API in order to be able to send out notifications without being bottlenecked by the limitations of the request that submitted the event.
XMPP isn't just for output - they also support querying the logger via XMPP, as well as subscribing, unsubscribing, and submitting events via XMPP.
On the API end of things, there's already a Python logging handler, which uses threads to asynchronously upload new log events without slowing down the app that's using it.
There's a lot of similarities to gnip and PubSubHubbub here. I think it would be particularly interesting to see them offering atom output and using PubSubHubbub, especially if they consumed it as well as outputting it - it would expand this project's scope substantially.
waph
Another group wrote a monitoring frontend hosted on App Engine, due to being unhappy with ganeti's interface. It's currently at a fairly early stage, supporting creating new graps from the RRD files provided by ganeti - the created graphs then update automatically on the web interface, which certainly looks impressive. Graphs are rendered in-browser using the canvas API. Unfortunately, due to the restrictions of where they could fetch ganeti information from, they didn't end up writing any of the app on App Engine.
Open Dropbox
Open Dropbox is a clone of Dropbox. Unlike Dropbox, Open Dropbox is decentralised, It's still a work-in-progress, but here's what's planned: It will be possible to share and sync folders with hundreds of other users. They build the whole project around doctests, as they made it easier to think about requirements in a comprehensible fashion, while specifying the requirements in the form of a test.
Communication between peers is handled by having each peer generate a public key for themselves, then upload it over HTTPS to App Engine. Other peers can then request the keys - again over a secure link with the App Engine app. Messages between peers are secured and verified using the public keys, using keyCzar.
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