So as usual the links(in this case link):

1. http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/ The official and possibly only documentation out there…

So appengine is google’s answer to amazon’s EC2 cloud computing. Switching to appengine won’t be easy, especially if you are very much into SQL databases. The shift to appengine can leave you gasping for air(or for JOIN ). Anyway since I was new to this whole stuff-web development, SQL, etc- so I found nothing much difficult. I think I have already professed my love for python. The whole pupose of studying python then was to gear up for appengine. Python is a language that lets you do your work and doesn’t get in your way.

But java developers need not be afraid. It is cuurently available in Java(with a very nice eclipse plugin) and  Python flavour. Choose whatever tastes best to you

I started by doing the “getting started” thing, thereafter it was plain sailing. Not that plain a sailing though. Thing is the tutorial they give is based on webapp( a web application framework based on python- something like struts, rails, etc). Webapp is new in this brutal world of internet, hence its evangelists are few if not none. What I did was switch to django. Django??? what’s that? haven’t I told about that before…Shucks I must be losing sense of time and space. Either way django is too good to be made just a passing reference, I’ll elaborate about it in the next post or something. Promise .

So what was I doing in appengine. well a nice application called “sanjhachoolha” (http://code.google.com/p/sanjhachoolha). Since this is the reason for my sustained absence in the blogosphere, I’ll harp about it later in a different post.

Either way what is so great about appengine- well its free hosting- atleast that’s the most alluring aspect for me. Also scalability, a techno-crap word. It is to say it will “deliver” for a large crowd without you needing to bother about servers, their maintenance, etc. And did I mention BDFL- Guido van rossum is a google employee currently working on appengine? So scalability, free hosting  vs a “different” approach to databases. Most of the databases you have heard about are “relational” but google’s “datastore” the database of appengine in “non-relational” in nature. What I can say is appengine dtabase is like an infinite excel sheet. you can add anything almost anywhere, they need not be under the same column, the same column may have different types of entries, etc. Cloud computing is something which will probably drive the future, so having a basic understanding of what it can do and what are the possible limitations it will suffer, these are very essential for a prospective software enthusiast.

So my TODO list is: a post on django and a post on “sanjhachoolha”

Also audience- Post some comments please, (someone, something, anything…)my blog looks empty :’(

First things first: fedora 11 is out. Checkout http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora . I’ll point out beforehand before anyone curses me afterwards- there are a few quirks in the installation. In my case I’ll be waiting for fedora unity(http://fedoraunity.org) to come up with its spin before jumping right in. But seriously guys, it’s me, you, our fault that these minor glitches came up. If only I (you/we) had taken a few minutes to beta test the product, it would have been better for all of us. Testing is not that difficult- mostly its a matter of spending 1 hr(oh my gosh!.. I can’t afford to loose that time- hell with that cliche) in one month/ week and filing bug reports.
I for one will try my best to put up that time(my hardware permitting) for the next release.

For those still following my intern- well my appengine project hit a pause, as I am supposed to resolve some minor bugs in a symfony project which my mentor has completed. Since I dashed out into symfony without my PHP basics, I decided it was time to learn symfony in detail and hence decided to start at the source- PHP. So I have started learning php from the apress book “beginning php and mysql”. I find it very detailed( perhaps too much? )and also starting from the scratch( that means newcomers to computer languages- if such a specimen of adult homo sapien of the subspecies “geek” still exists- will find it most friendly).
Now PHP is a quite strange language. I must admit as of now I am highly biased against it in favour of python(python rox \o/). But since many things in internet is either php or asp( atleast my friend said so), I decided to learn php in earnest, good or bad.
If you have a c, c++ background you’ll find it doesn’t have anything extraordinarily different( at least on the surface, which is how deep I have been into PHP)- except some “loose typing” features. I believe if php comes in with something like IDLE( the python IDE) or IRB( interactive ruby) it might increase its fan following a little more.

Anyway, I’ll try to make up for my long absence with a string of posts.

Database Normalization:

Ok I’ll admit at the outset- I have never ever written a MySQL query. But I think the theoretical aspects are clear to me-

So why do we need normalization.

1. To eliminate redundant data-removing same information stored in different places.

2. To ensure only related data is there in a table

3. It helps to save storage space(a quite precious commodity), ensures faster lookups, and other stuff which I don’t know about

I’ll start out by listing some very nice resources:

1. The initial wiki stuff which I must admit is quite sparse(all theory no practical)- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization and the related E-R diagrams- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-relationship_model

2. Now to the practical aspects- http://www.phlonx.com/resources/nf3/ Ok this one is the best normalization tutorial. It makes the database normalization process crystal clear. I’ll advice you go through this one definitely

3. http://databases.about.com/od/specificproducts/a/normalization.htm a good read. Not as methodical as the previous one  but it discusses a little(very little) about 4NF which may be useful. Either way, a quick read won’t hurt. a similar link would be: http://www.devhood.com/tutorials/tutorial_details.aspx?tutorial_id=95

4. http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/intro-to-normalization.html ,Now Mike is a bigwig in the MySQL business so I must include this too His post got me interested in his presentation http://www.mikehillyer.com/presentations/ named “introduction to database modeling with MySql workbench”. I am sure the rest of his presentations were also as wonderful, but I didn’t have time to go through all of them.

Wrap up:

The normal forms are cumulative- for a database to be in 3NF, it must satisfy 1NF AND 2NF criteria . So 1NF says make your table atomic- there should be no grouping of data, everything should be laid bare. 2NF says every column should be related to all the members of the primary key. If not separate related data and form a new table and relate it to the original table through “foreign keys”. The 3NF requires that every field depends on ONLY primary key( i.e equivalently on the fields that make up the primary key)

Now I present some informal way to make DB designing painless and easy. These steps help in getting the general outline of the overall database:

1. Understand the problem at hand

2. Every noun(entity) has its own table.

3. Every table has an id which serves as it’s primary key

4. now start looking into interrelations

i. If its a many to many relationship between two nouns then create a associating table(usually named by concatenating the two nouns) with its own id and the ids of the two tables as foreign keys.

5. The foreign key always flows from the one to many table and not the other way round.

I’ll point out again that these are sort of my own quick fixes, and quick fixes are always dirty and frowned upon. But they atleast give you a rough idea of the final database structure.

Have fun!

ciao

So before I even got seriously involved in symphony, I was asked to look into Database designing and  the next day that I was engrossed in DB designing(“normalization” stuff- a nice topic for a future post), Vijay(the VP of neev) comes up and discusses wether I know python – well I have “heard” of python, and also about king cobras and boa constrictors- and also if I have heard of Google appengine. Anyway he was referring to the python programming language. So I turned to mighty google and trusty wiki.

So python is the brainchild of Guido van Russum the benevolent dictator for life(BDFL)- a term coined especially for him by the python community-who to this day holds a mighty sway over its past, present and future course. Some links I’d like you all to visit are:

http://www.python.org/doc/ – the official python documentation site

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_Dictator_For_Life- BDFL  : p

so to get started in python head to http://www.python.org/download/ and get the windows installer by clicking on a particular python version. If you are linux user you most probably just need to update your python, so just “yum update python” (well I use fedora so I know only fedora specific instructions). You may want to wait out a bit though- staying on the edge has its price- as i realised soon enough [GAE troubles =) ].

For windoze users- there are two(or more, I don’t know) choices before you- get the official windows .msi installer or get the http://www.activestate.com/activepython/ apparently the second choice offers some windoze specific goodies(some COM support, etc- don’t know much myself).

ok, now to the python 3.0 “issues”- python 3.x is the most recent release. Most of the junta out there still uses python 2.x. It is important to note that python 3.x is NOT backward compatible. So my “current requirement”- google appengine uses python 2.5 hence after I had enthusiastically installed 3.0 I had to install a new “old” version 2.5 python. But don’t worry both python2.5 and python 3.0 reside on separate folders and hence it was no issue at all- I just executed the 2.5′s .msi and that was all.

After installation I ran IDLE( the windows gui IDE of python). I must say the help of python is quite thorough so just go to help and refer to python manuals and then you should be ready to “python”. So my newbie advice is use the help’s manual and no need to waste time searching for good ebooks on the net( though it may not be a bad idea-just time intensive). The python documentation link is all you’ll ever need if you need further resources. Head out to #python@irc.freenode.net for help. It has a “VERY”( and I mean it) large active following.

So after this once again awfullly long post I must get back to learning python-wish me luck.

Talk about DB normalization and GAE in the next few posts(probably).

1. dreamweaver: I think it’s no longer called by that name since adobe brought over macromedia but anyway itwas the the first web developer friendly IDE i worked with hence I decided it needs a passing mention. It has some all the common niceties like code-completion,…. but since I am highly against proprietary tools I’ll let this one pass.

2. Eclipse-An idea that can change the world…Eclipse is the least(least??) common denominator first conceived by IBM. Sort of a base IDE which you can top off with plugins of your choice. Completely open source(yipee!). If there is something nice you are looking for…some feature , some idea, anything  chances are there exists a plugin for it already. The latest ganymede of eclipse is causing problems for me as of now hence I have given it the second last position(if someone is listening out here- when I added a c/c++ development plugin on top of a php development tools all in one eclipse, I lost out all the php functionality-code highlight, even the php perspective-anyway maybe it is due to a problem on my side)

3. Well here is my star player- Aptana studio(based on eclipse and also available as an eclipse plugin)- I fell in love with this piece of beauty the instant I installed it. It has got it’s own internal server(never used it though) but what’s more important is that it can use an external server too- that means all I have to do is fire up wamp…add the location of httpd.exe in a “add new external server” and I can preview my page right out of aptana itself…no need to open up a browser. I can view my page rendered for firefox, IE(and others if I wish to) in a nice tab alongside the source of the page. What more can a newbie like me wish for!

So the winner right now in my limited experience is Aptana..

I(as a newbie) will recommend that you use it with wamp server to right away get down to business. WAMP .well nothing as good as WAMP: http://www.wampserver.com/en/

Another link would be: http://trac.symfony-project.org/wiki/SymfonyOnWAMP but I think it refers to the old wamp release(but no problem   ).

Steps I would suggest that you take are:

1. Get wamp from it’s website. Install it.

2. If you now execute wamp and if you get a white half pie symbol-err..a tachometer(it will go from red to yellow don’t worry) on your system tray then you are good for the start.

(i)Else(if it’s red or yellow): you need to check which service is running(apache or MySQL) and which is not. Click the tray icon-go to Apache(or MySQL-whichever is the culprit) and go to service menu…See if its running(or if it’s the problem, it’s asking to be run )

(ii)As a last ditch edit the line in httpd.conf(available in the Apache menu from the tray icon) that says listen 80 to “listen 8080″(without the quotes of course) also change my.ini(from the mysql menu) so that [MYSQLd] points to port 3307(or just damn search for 3306 and replace with 3307)[refer these for more help http://www.azazia.com/kb/entry/7/ OR  http://www.wampserver.com/phorum/read.php?2,34885,page=2 ]

That’s all I can help in debugging

3. In the wamp menu go to php -> PHP extensions and click php_xsl and see to it that php_pdo_sqlite is already ticked. Don’t worry if it throws quirks/errors at you-play along…You will have to restart the server(or exit and start again wamp) –thing to note there are two php.ini( one is in wamp/bin/php/php5.2.x and other in wamp/bin/apache) so if you decide to do things manually check that both are set right.

4. Go to httpd.conf(how you ask? click icon->apache->httpd.conf ). And find a line :

#LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

remove the leading hash # symbol to uncomment it.( this thingy caused a real pain when I was neck deep in my first symfony project)

5. ok…You are ready to go….Navigate to http://localhost:80(which is the same as http://localhost) or http://localhost:8080 (if you tinkered with httpd.conf in step 2)…if god shows mercy you’ll get a nice wamp server screen…

6. Time to read tutorials(the first link i mentioned)….If you want to get right into I’ll suggest first read up day 1 of the “jobeet” tutorial and then get back to “my first symfony project”

7. If you get stuck- get to #symfony@freenode.net and bother some really wonderful people.

(i) If you are getting problems with php….then do php -i|more on the command prompt/terminal- that will tell you all about your cause of php troubles.

note: you may get a warning somewhere along your first project or whatever saying that you should get a php accelerator(some apc)….just don’t bother.

Phew that was a long post….I wonder why it was soooo big. Well I guess this blog is useful only for windooze users-sorry linux bros-right now I am stuck on a windooze platform.