A friend pointed me to the release of TypeScript and the video where Anders Hejsberg provided an explanation and multiple examples of Microsoft’s latest efforts to improve JavaScript development. For me personally the video is a real throwback to the days attending team meetings at Borland where Anders would demo Delphi language features. In fact, there’s an interesting parallel between TypeScript and Delphi where both require proprietary interface files to call functions in external modules with the same issues of getting these files generated/updated.

I’ve been working in the OS world for the last few years now and I’m left scratching my head wondering where this effort is going? It places huge emphasis on Intellisense and error insight features yet ignores how one might approach actually debugging all this beautifully unfamiliar generated code. Throughout the video I kept asking “Why wouldn’t they simply offer their own Dart-like alternative?”

While it “feels” fun and has the ususal Anders demo props going for it seeing a compiler infer types simply isn’t as exciting as it was the first go-round and the lack of a debug session demo left me feeling rather hollow. Had MS released an updated IE natively supporting TypeScript… but no we’re not back in IE 3 days, that ship has sailed.

Perhaps it’s an Enterprise play to help those lowly Enterprise developers conquer JavaScript in a way that’s more palatable by management? Ah, I don’t think so as it’s all interestingly packed as Open Source.

Don’t get me wrong I appreciate type safety as much as the next compiler fan and in many ways I long for those good ol’ type safe days but I’m pretty skeptical that this is the right path forward.

In the past I’ve built starter kits for Facebook development in ASP.NET and building CruiseControl plugins. My latest interest has been experimenting with Google AppEngine as my day job is all python appserver stuff so it’s a pretty logical fit. I’m slowly putting together all of the pieces I’d like to have in website starter kit including support for jQuery Mobile and Facebook Graph API.

I have a simple proof-of-concept app working here. Btw, as this is a work-in-progress it YMMV and the app may or may not be in a working state so apologies in advance.

Technologies used:

Google AppEngine

Cheetah Templates

Facebook Graph API

jQuery Mobile

Here’s a routine I wrote to pretty print a Python dict into an HTML table and though I’d share.

    def prettyTable(dictionary, cssClass=''):
        ''' pretty prints a dictionary into an HTML table(s) '''
        if isinstance(dictionary, str):
            return '<td>' + dictionary + '</td>'
        s = ['<table ']
        if cssClass != '':
            s.append('class="%s"' % (cssClass))
        s.append('>\n')
        for key, value in dictionary.iteritems():
            s.append('<tr>\n  <td valign="top"><strong>%s</strong></td>\n' % str(key))
            if isinstance(value, dict):
                if key == 'picture' or key == 'icon':
                    s.append('  <td valign="top"><img src="%s"></td>\n' % Page.prettyTable(value, cssClass))
                else:
                    s.append('  <td valign="top">%s</td>\n' % Page.prettyTable(value, cssClass))
            elif isinstance(value, list):
                s.append("<td><table>")
                for i in value:
                    s.append('<tr><td valign="top">%s</td></tr>\n' % Page.prettyTable(i, cssClass))
                s.append('</table>')
            else:
                if key == 'picture' or key == 'icon':
                    s.append('  <td valign="top"><img src="%s"></td>\n' % value)
                else:
                    s.append('  <td valign="top">%s</td>\n' % value)
            s.append('</tr>\n')
        s.append('</table>')
        return '\n'.join(s)

When I made the move from Windows to OSX and Python development one of the things I wanted to experiment with has been Google’s AppEngine. I installed the SDK and setup the plugin for Eclipse but ran into a few issues I wanted to make note of since I think other could probably benefit from it as well. I’ll mention I’m on OSX 10.6.8 using Eclipse for Java Version Helios SR 2.

Creating a new AppEngine project in Eclipse

With the plugin installed you get an AppEngine project template listed under PyDev.

Clicking Next displays the standard Eclipse dialog for a new project where you enter the name and optionally a few other project settings. However, it’s the dialog after that where I had my first question where you’re prompted for the Google App Engine Directory which in my case corresponds to:

/Applications/GoogleAppEngineLauncher.app/Contents/Resources/GoogleAppEngine-default.bundle/Contents/Resources/google_appengine/

Google instructions for development in Eclipse didn’t answer this question and it wasn’t immediately obvious to me. At any rate, once this path is set correctly you’ll immediately see a list of AppEngine modules to be included on the PYTHONPATH:

Configuring the Project's Python Interpreter

After I successfully created the AppEngine project I wanted to look at the appengine-boilerplate for HTML5 which is based on HTML5 boilerplate which is well worth checking out. Next, I used the Google AppEngine Console to create a new application called “helloworld954” then copied the boilerplate files into my project and edited the app.yaml file to set the application name:

application: helloworld954

I then ran the project and everything looked ok but when I hit the page from the browser (http://localhost:8080) I got:

ImportError: No module named cgi

Which I subsequently discovered more information about here.

Now, IIRC my MacBook Pro came with Python 2.6 as the default version though v2.5 was installed as well and given AppEngine is, as of this writing, based on v2.5 I figured rather than tweaking dev_appserver.py as mentioned on that prior link I figured I’d first try the proper Python version. I right clicked my project from the package explorer and selected Properties then clicked the PyDev – Interpreter/Grammar option then clicked the “Click here to configure an interpreter not listed” link (blue link below).

Next, on the preferences dialog (which I won’t screenshot here as it’s too big) I clicked New… and added a new interpreter option for “Python v2.5” with a path of:

/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/Resources/Python.app/Contents/MacOS/Python

Btw, I think I tried the symlink but that wasn’t allowed (again, I think).

At any rate, once I saved those changes voila the boilerplate project started working. Ah, one step I overlooked was setting up a debug configuration for this project:

The main module for the application has to be Google’s dev_apperser.py file which is located here on my machine:

/Applications/GoogleAppEngineLauncher.app/Contents/Resources/GoogleAppEngine-default.bundle/Contents/Resources/google_appengine/dev_appserver.py

Also, under the (x)= Agruments tab I set the Program Arguments to “.” for the current working directory and for "Working Directory" I selected "Other" with a value of "$(workspace_loc:starterkit}" Note, starterkit is the name of my project.

The final result:

Hopefully, this helps someone else, it will certainly help me months from now when I trying to do the same thing again so I won’t have try and recall all these steps.

Recently, I received an email via my blog asking for a VS.NET 2010 version of my Facebook Starter Kit. Since I no longer work on Windows it hasn’t been a high priority so I offered instructions on how to extract the project from the .vsi file and load the project manually. Much to my (pleasant) surprise I got a follow-up email with an updated starter kit for VS.NET 2010 updated to .NET v4.

If anyone decides they want to upgrade the FDT to the latest version I’d be happy to post an update for that as well. The starter kit is available on Facebook is nearing 5600 users! An interesting side note, I’m no longer able to edit the properties of this application on Facebook because it contains the word “facebook” in the URL which is no longer allowed.

Enjoy!

This is a post for me to aggregate various FQL queries.

Fetch the Facebook like count for a given URL

SELECT like_count FROM link_stat 
WHERE url="http://www.stevetrefethen.com/blog/"

Facebook user's connections

SELECT target_id,target_type,is_following 
FROM connection WHERE source_id = facebook_userid

Facebook Share count on a page

SELECT share_count, like_count, comment_count, total_count 
FROM link_stat 
WHERE url="http://www.stevetrefethen.com/school/"

Fetch open graph id for a url:

SELECT id,type,site FROM object_url 
WHERE url="http://www.stevetrefethen.com/school/"

View which groups a user belongs to

SELECT name,gid FROM group 
WHERE gid IN (SELECT gid FROM group_member 
WHERE uid = facebook_userid)

Fetch a "friend map"

Replace UID with logged in user id. Via this page.

SELECT uid1, uid2
FROM friend
WHERE uid1 IN (SELECT uid1 FROM friend WHERE uid2=UID)
AND uid2 IN (SELECT uid1 FROM friend WHERE uid2=UID)
AND uid1 < uid2

Names of the places you've checked in

SELECT name FROM page 
WHERE page_id IN 
(SELECT page_id FROM checkin WHERE author_uid = me())

Names of the Places your Friends have checked in

SELECT name FROM page 
WHERE page_id IN (SELECT page_id FROM checkin WHERE author_uid IN 
(SELECT uid2 FROM friend WHERE uid1 = me()))

You can play around with executing these here including your Facebook user id if you're logged in.