App Engine Cookbook: On-demand Cron Jobs
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under python, tech, app-engine, cookbook, coding
Today's post is, by necessity, a brief one. I'm travelling to San Francisco for I/O at the moment, and my flight was delayed so much I missed my connection in Atlanta and had to stay the night; in fact, I'm writing and posting this from the plane, using the onboard WiFi!
In a previous post, I introduced a recipe for high concurrency counters, which used a technique that I believe deserves its own post, since it's a useful pattern on its own. That technique is what I'm calling "On-demand Cron Jobs"
It's not at all uncommon for apps to have a need to do periodic updates at intervals, where the individual updates are small, and may even shift in time. One example is deleting or modifying any entry that hasn't been modified in the last day. In apps that need to do this, it's not uncommon to see a cron job like the following:
cron: - description: Clean up old data url: /tasks/cleanup schedule: every 1 minute
This works, but it potentially consumes a significant amount of resources checking repeatedly if there's anything to clean up. Using the task queue ...
Building a censorship resistant publishing system
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under tech, censorship-resistant, dht, coding
I've had an idea related to censorship resistant publishing kicking around in my head for some time now, and it seems like it's about time I got it written down somewhere, for consideration and criticism. Part of my motivation is that I'm intending to snatch some spare time while I'm on the plane to the US this weekend (to attend I/O) to have a go at implementing a basic version of it.
In a nutshell, I have a design for what I believe would be a fairly robust censorship resistant publishing system, based on a DHT, and integrating fully with the web. Content published using this system would be available in exactly the same fashion as a regular website, which strikes me as a major advantage over many other proposals for similar systems.
The system consists of several layers, which I'll tackle in order:
- Document storage and retrieval
- Name resolution for documents within a 'site'
- External access
- Name resolution for sites
Document storage and retrieval
The lowest level of the system is also the simplest: That of storing and retrieving documents. This layer of the system acts more or less exactly like a regular ...
Authenticating against App Engine from an Android app
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under tech, app-engine, java, android
Many an Android app requires a server backend of some sort, and what better choice than App Engine? It's free, reliable, and does everything you're likely to need in a backend. It has one other major advantage, too: It supports Google Account authentication, and nearly all Android users will already have a Google Account.
So given that we want a backend for our app, and given that we want to have user authentication, how do we go about this? We could prompt the user for their credentials, but that seems less than ideal: the Android device already has their credentials, and users may not trust us with them. Is there a way we can leverage an Android API to take care of authentication? It turns out there is.
Authentication with App Engine, regardless of where you're doing it, is a three-stage process:
- Obtain an authentication token. This can be done with ClientLogin for installed apps, for example, or with AuthSub for a webapp. When logging in directly to an application, this is the part of the login process where your user sees a Google signin screen.
- Take that authentication token, and use it to obtain an authentication ...