Be Hostels Is Out

Today I released the new  Be Hostels Web Page which I completely  redesigned and reprogrammed as freelance producer.

Try the hostel booking service and tell me if is enough user friendly, I think it is.

Social Quorum Is Out!!

Social Quorum is a Facebook application for social game creation. There are 6 available games at the moment.

You can create  polls, quiz games, personality tests, lotteries, contests and much more. The statistical service is very interesting especially for the multiple choices questions.

Try it out and tell us!

Fireworks Say: A facebook app to send messages written on fireworks

Today I released a simple Facebook application: Fireworksay.

You can write a message that is displayed with  nice fireworks (a flash animation), you can choose the color and after saving you can post the message to friend's walls and page's walls.

For more information just try it!
This is the url for accessing inside facebook

If you prefer you you can go directly to the web site

I used Django non-rel for the back-end and Flint for the flash animation.

El proyecto sensografia gana un Sol de Oro, Sensografia wins a golden prize!

El proyecto "Sensografia"  gana el oro en la sección viral y experimental del festival iberoamericano de la publicidad.
El proyecto se compone en un software para la creación de arte generativa y un microsite  en As3/PHP.
Yo he participado en la fase creativa y desarrollado  la solución.
Clientes: Grupo Solmelia
Microsite: www.doscielos.com
Info: sensografia.org

Brand new project running on GAE. What to choose?

I have to build a web project in a very short time (3 weeks)

Features:
Google service integration (spreadsheet, authentication, probably Picasa)
Great template language as non-programmers will add new features using functions in the template context.
Monitoring and controls of the state of the CPU load, data, caches, singletons, etc.
Hight traffic, low cost high availability, that's why we want GAE
I cannot deal with bugs for time and health (:-)) reasons

1) Java, Freemarker, AspectJ, Scala

Advantages:
Fastest environment, a lot of open source libraries (maybe too much), I can choose between three interpreters (Groovy, Scala, Jython)
Disadvantages:
FreeMarker template seems buggy as in GAE the reflection package is not the standard one, I don't want to use Velocity or JSP. Any other great template engine candidate?

2) Jruby
Advantages:
Very productive, vibrant community
Disadvantages:
It is starting to be mature now on GAE and I still do not know anybody that professionally delivers Jruby solutions on GAE, any high traffic web app use Jruby on GAE?


3) Django Solution
Advantages:
Native on Google, Django template engine is lovely
Disadvantages:
I never delivered a project with Django

I also tried Grails but it seems to be slow and buggy on GAE.

After 3 days testing and reading forums of Java technologies, now I am making the demo I prepared in Django, let's see....

Another scrum joke about the Pig and the Chicken

One day the Pig (Adobe) meets an old friend the Chicken (Apple) and says:

Pig: Hey broth what's up? My ham is ready to be served with your funky eggs. Let's set up a party on the beach! everybody will love our old dish in the new style!!

Chicken: hi, you know ... I am not sure ....  my eggs are bio and your second hand ham will not match.....  one thing more ...  I didn't  like the commissions that you charged for the last party!! so I thing you better go to other non-bio chicken to set up your business!

Bug in Picasa web album python client library

I write it here because I did not find any clear resource on the web.

I have found an error executing the first line of code in the API documentation (after the authentication section) of Picasa python library:

try to get the albums:
albums =  self.gd_client.GetUserFeed().entry

this code:
def AnyFeedFromString(xml_string):
   tree = ElementTree.fromstring(xml_string)

fire:
 tree = ElementTree.fromstring(xml_string)
  File "", line 85, in XML
SyntaxError: syntax error: line 1, column 0


Workaround:
Some problems with SSL:
self.gd_client.ssl = False