An application does not always use dynamic code to handle requests and there are plenty of static content to be served as-it-is. For example, flash animations, images and stylesheets etcetera are all served directly without any processing required.

Google https://www.programmerfish.com/category/app-engine-google/' target='_blank'>App Engine does not provide any automatic way manage directory structure and it has to be specified in your app.yaml file. This is how it’s done:

Suppose your main app directory is helloworld and you have a stylesheet named style.css in helloworld/styles. This is how you edit your app.yaml file to map all requests to /styles to helloworld/styles directory. This is actually archived by URL re-writing.

Who says https://www.programmerfish.com/category/app-engine-google/' target='_blank'>App Engine aint attracting explosive developers to come develop and host their app on its cloud? Here is a collection of my picks of apps hosted on Google https://www.programmerfish.com/category/app-engine-google/' target='_blank'>App Engine:

1. Overgrowth

Overgrowth is a 3d action-adventure game for Mac, Windows, and Linux, coming soon from the independent game studio, Wolfire Games.
https://www.wolfire.com/overgrowth

Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer has said that Windows https://www.programmerfish.com/category/windows-azure-microsoft/' target='_blank'>Azure will be fully ready for final release before the end of 2009. While speaking to the Wall Street analysts this Tuesday about Microsoft’s financial status, Ballmer said:

“[https://www.programmerfish.com/category/windows-azure-microsoft/' target='_blank'>Azure] will reach fruition with the PDC this year,"

Windows https://www.programmerfish.com/category/windows-azure-microsoft/' target='_blank'>Azure is Microsoft’s Cloud Computing platform that provides highly scalable web hosting supporting Software+Services model on the basis of Pay-as-you-go. As Google has announced today the unlimited scalability of their Google https://www.programmerfish.com/category/app-engine-google/' target='_blank'>App Engine by introducing pricing if one needs to go beyond the free offerings. This makes a tough competition for Microsoft in the market as Google App engine is initially free to some limitations and can be extended by paying if one wants to scale the business further. Although Windows https://www.programmerfish.com/category/windows-azure-microsoft/' target='_blank'>Azure offers more power when it comes to a highly customizable, Service Oriented Architecture and data centric cloud applications.

Microsoft introduced https://www.programmerfish.com/category/windows-azure-microsoft/' target='_blank'>Azure at its PDC 2008 in October. It actually competes with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Who says scaling is free? It does come at a cost but not what you have to pay if you were managing your own mammoth server halls. Google today announced its pricing structure for https://www.programmerfish.com/category/app-engine-google/' target='_blank'>App Engine so incase your app is growing beyond your free assigned quota, you might consider taking some pennies out (yes, literally pennies!) and buy some more resources.

According to Google:

You can now set a daily budget for your app that represents the maximum amount you're willing to pay for computing resources each day. You allocate this budget across CPU, bandwidth, storage, and email, and you pay for only what your app consumes beyond the free thresholds -- prorated up to the nearest penny.

This screencast explains the process:

Yesterday we learned how to create a simple Hello World app on https://www.programmerfish.com/category/app-engine-google/' target='_blank'>App Engine and deploy it on the local web server that comes with https://www.programmerfish.com/category/app-engine-google/' target='_blank'>App Engine SDK. Read that tutorial here.

Now, once your app is complete, how to deploy it in the Cloud so that you can show it to the world!

First Step:
1) Create a Google account
2) Goto https://appengine.google.com and login
3) Click Create Application.
4) Select your country and enter your mobile number.

There are may graphical FTP clients available that help to deal with everyday FTP problems. But to be a complete FTP nerd, there is a list of commands that you should know to solve your everyday tasks even by using a command line interface. Other than this, if you are programming something that uses FTP a lot at core level then here is the complete list of FTP commands enlisted by Vandana Pandey of MSDN Blogs:

Microsoft Office Live Small Business has sponsored this e-book about Social Media, helping you to understand this powerful resource. It is written by John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing

According to the Author:

When used properly, social media can be a great tool to help your business reach untapped, potential customers and stay connected to current ones. But there are a few things you’ll need to know to help you get the most out of social media as well as your online presence in its entirety. Microsoft Office Live Small Business sponsored the creation of this eBook in an effort to help break social media down into easy-to-understand pieces, so you can make sense of and make use of this powerful resource in a way that grows your business. Let’s talk.

This book is an interesting free resource to understand Social Media.

You can download it by clicking here

Cloud Computing is a buzz word now and every developer MUST know how to program and  deploy on the Cloud be it Google’s https://www.programmerfish.com/category/app-engine-google/' target='_blank'>App Engine or Microsoft’s https://www.programmerfish.com/category/windows-azure-microsoft/' target='_blank'>Azure or Amazon’s EC2. Here is a very simple tutorial on how to create Hello World (traditionally the very first app we write on anything new we learn) on https://www.programmerfish.com/category/app-engine-google/' target='_blank'>App Engine.

Since it took me some time figuring out a some details which were very vaguely defined on the official text-tutorial on Google Code, so I thought of explaining it to the very minute detail for all the starters out there.

Step One (Get the Essentials):
Download Python Release 2.5.4
Download Google https://www.programmerfish.com/category/app-engine-google/' target='_blank'>App Engine SDK

Here is a very nice video which explains Cloud Computing in plain english. It cover all the essential components of cloud computing like SaaS, Scalibility, On Demand usage etc. It’s a great video for starters and those who want to demonstrate what the hell is cloud computing to their bosses too 😉 (Because convincing them is a hell of a task when your boss can only understand financial statements)

I just discovered a nice improvement by Microsoft regarding maintainability of Windows .I was experiencing some screen disturbance and flicking among drawn windows and taskbar on my desktop. It didn’t bothered me much because I thought its some lag in the Beta version. Then I noticed the action center and saw this popup:

 
Windows 7 automatically detected the problem I was having with the display driver of my PC and put it up in the action center for resolving. I clicked Open Action Center and saw the problem to be queued up in the maintenance category:

Does your website breaks up when it comes to be viewed on Internet Explorer 8? And you hate it! Here is the way by which you can set your website’s content to be always viewed on compatibility mode of IE8.

Add the following tag on your website to make it to be always run on compatibility mode when its opened on IE8:

This cool video demonstrates some awesome work from guys at Microsoft Technology Center. They have integrated multi-touch with a physics engine and it looks so cool! check out the video

People at Infostrat  have done some of the best Virtual Earth integration work on Microsoft Surface.  Have a look at this video that highlights their work:

Do you hate Internet Explorer 6 just because it messes up transparency of your site’s PNG images? really its pathetic! And its fact that many people still use it. And do you know that this problem can be solved? yes it can be! I have found some good solutions to make transparent PNGs work on IE 5.5 and 6.

Up until IE7, there has been no fully native support for PNG alpha channel transparency in Internet Explorer. However, since IE5.5 there has been some support in the form of proprietary filter called the AlphaImageLoader. Internet Explorer filters can be applied directly in your CSS (for both inline and background images), or by setting the same CSS property with JavaScript.

Here are two useful solutions that can solve this problem:

Guys at Directthought are developing an application for iPhone that will allow users to manage and control the Amazon EC2 environment form an iPhone.

This application uses a toolkit called cTypica which is an Objective-C version of the popular typica Java toolkit for AWS. This will be released under the Apache 2.0 License to enable others to gain access to Amazon's service from their own iPhone applications.

directthought is proud to announce the development of a native iPhone application to access and control Amazon's EC2. You'll be able to keep tabs on your EC2 resource (instances, volumes, etc.) using this application running on your iPhone. Because it is a native application, it doesn't rely on any other server. All you rely on are your iPhone, Amazon's servers and your internet connection. This application is under development and has been tested on the iPhone and iPod touch. We're posting some preliminary screen shots. These are subject to change as the application is refined prior to release

Here are some screenshots: