Archive for January, 2009

Giftag/Google App Engine Case Study

Giftag is gift registry Add On for FireFox and Explorer. It lets you pick things from any site, add them to a list, and share that list where ever you want. Its free, it supports open standards, and its recently been re-platformed on Google App Engine.
Here’s a quick recap from our development team about why we chose GAE, what we like about it, what APIs we use, what we wish it had, and a few tips for people getting started on GAE.



Here are links to the documentation mentioned:
Sharding Counters by Joe Gregario

Paging on GAE by Joe Gregario

Building Scalable Apps by Brett Slatkin

GAEGene Library Contributed by Giftag

Hope its helpful. Let us know what you think.

Gaegene Released

One of the goals in developing Giftag was to learn a bleeding edge technology (Google App Engine) and to provide any useful code/design patterns we created back to the community.  Gaegene, licensed under the Apache License 2.0, is the result of that goal.

This first release of the library (Download v0.1: ZIP, GZ or BZ2) contains two modular applications to assist with sharded counters and slugs.  Future releases will add support/utilities for images, pagination, and tags.  The repository and documentation are hosted on bitbucket.org.

If you’re a GAE developer (or even if you’re just contemplating a GAE webapp), give the Gaegene Wiki a look.  It contains usage examples and detailed public APIs.  There is also a testing App Engine webapp that serves both as an example of Gaegene uses and a set of functional tests (with nearly 100% code coverage).  It utilizes the Django web framework and the App Engine Patch project.

As always, we welcome and encourage any and all feedback, patches, and enhancements.  We’re all in this together, so let’s keep giving.

Firefox Approved

Mozilla Firefox
Image via Wikipedia

At long last the Giftag Firefox add-on is no longer under ‘experimental’ status. Firefox approved the add-on today so you can download it direct from addons.mozilla.org. But wait - now we need to update it on Mozilla - the latest version, 2.4, is still only available here. Doh. We’ll get that fixed right away.

Anyway, here’s what the people are saying:

  • LOVE it!

    Giftag is the best and continues to get better with each release. I can’t wait to send all my wishes to my family for Christmas time, then a month later for my birthday!

    by KCB48 on October 7, 2008

  • greatest thing ever

    I freakin love this app. This is going to make gift shopping (and giving hints) SO MUCH EASIER. No more trying to make 20 different registries for all the different stores. This keeps it all in one place! The ony thing is it can be a little confusing at first but after a few minutes I was shopping all over the internet.

    by Rebecca Kay on October 7, 2008

  • Giftag

    Super slick. I like picking something and having it show up in my gift bar. Makes me greedy! It’s cool that I can pick things from any store, plus post things like a listing for a house I want (see the greedy part, previously mentioned).

    by Jackie Osking on October 7, 2008

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