Firefox Add-on Automated Updates

Since Firefox moved to a rapid release cycle, there has been concern by some (including myself) as to whether add-ons would stay compatible with each of the new versions, and how one would go about testing to find any breaking changes.  In news that makes a geek happy - Mozilla has taken care of that for me as I received notice from Mozilla that stated:

Dear add-on author,

Good news! Our automated tests did not detect any compatibility issues with your add-on Google Music Hotkeys and Firefox 9.*. We've updated your add-on's compatibility to work with Firefox 9.* so that our Aurora users can begin using it.

This compatibility bump is server-side and we did not modify your add-on package in any way. If you wish or need to revert this change, just go to your add-on edit page on addons.mozilla.org, select the Status & Versions page, then the version, and change its maxVersion compatibility back to its previous value.

For more information on our new compatibility process with rapid Firefox releases, please read this post: http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2011/04/19/add-on-compatibility-rapid-releases/

Snakes in the Cloud

I used to think that building web applications in Python for Google's app engine was reserved for a desktop development environment.  I had hacked a bit on an app or two and used the command line tools to test and publish to the app engine.  Then I discovered CoderBuddy.   CoderBuddy is a one stop shop for building python apps for the app engine.  Once signed in you can create a blank project, or get a head start with one of six template apps.  One template is of course a "hello world" app, but there are a  few other samples including 3 that come with some Django (arguably the go to MVC framework for python web applications).   I tested a couple of the template apps and found them to be quite useful.  The "Adrian Remembers Me" template creates an app that allows users to become members and sign in.   Here is a look at the editor with the main.py file opened for this project:


Each of these templates could be either a good launching point or reference for a new developer looking to quickly create a Python app.  Deploying to the App Engine is just a few clicks away with CoderBuddy.  So I "created" my Adrian Remembers Me app in one click and about two minutes later had my site running on the app engine at http://cgack2-coderbuddy.appspot.com/.  The ease of deploy along with the ability to upload files and download the project as a .zip I will definitely look to CoderBuddy for part if not all of my next project.