Konstantin A Lukin's Blog (18)

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Lately a lot of us have been actively following Google's Giga initiative. What can be better than speeds 100x faster then what we already have, especially if it is offered for free? All this sounds good, but what's the catch?

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Being a tech-savvy customer, I was quite psyched about Google's release of Nexus One smartphone device. Not waiting for too long, I had to see for myself what other Android developers are chatting about. This blog is an attempt to give a decent overview of the device from it's usability… Continue

In this post, I'd like to share some of my development experience with AppEngine's data storage facility called BigTable. As you might already know, BigTable is different from a widely known relational persistence (RDBMS) in a way that it deals with Entities and Keys as opposed to tables and rows. It might not seem too obvious at first, but object-oriented persistence is radically different from its… Continue

In the process of discovering Google AppEngine's list of available features, I recently came across Cron Jobs and Task Queues. During my fairly extensive web development carrier, these terms always seemed like far away concepts that will not likely be a part of my average web development toolkit. At first, seeing these in AppEngine reminded me of those old mainframe systems that you read about in computer science manuals. One day I had some time to actually look into… Continue

Recently I've been working on a web project that requires quite an extensive CSS markup. Keeping it all in one file became unmanageable pretty quickly, so we've designed a way to split our styles into logical subdirectories with import statements, which is quite easily done with a css

@import tag. Here is an example of what a main file might look like:

@import 'common.css'; @import 'base.css';… Continue

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These days, web developers are faced with a lot of difficult choices. One of them is which technology to pick for the next app, another is which hosting to use. It takes time and experience to make winning choices, especially when dealing with time sensitive deliverables. Back in the days developers had to do it all: configure a server, set up database access, get a static ip, etc... Configuring and supporting such a system could probably be a full time job in itself. Hence another… Continue

GMail has been my email of choice for some time, but only recently that I've learned about some of its 'lesser known features', and especially their potential applicability. In this blog I'd like to describe how some of such features can be used to turn GMail into a handy personal database. For example, quite often I need to store information, such as scriptlets of code, notes, blog ideas, etc.. Before this recent discovery,… Continue

IT ALL STARTED WITH A SEARCH ENGINE. Back in the days, Google Search has taken over the web by its simplicity, light-weight, and precision of returned results.

Then Google slowly expanded into GMail, Calendar, Google Docs, etc.. in an attempt to replace desktop office with web-based alternatives. More features were being added constantly,… Continue

For all RIA fans out there who are deciding whether to go with GWT or Flex for your next project, I highly recommend to consider the following initiative. It is called

Ext GWT. It packages a well known

Ext JS Javascript library into GWT… Continue

Average software developer often juggles multiple projects at a time. One of common challenges is keeping track of time properly, especially when 'context switching' from one project to another. A quite useful tool for time tracking is

Google Calendar. Here is a list of most notable features: - Free and available with GMail acount - Syncs with CalDAV enabled clients (Apple iCal or Mozilla Sunbird) - Syncs with Windows… Continue

Recently, I've been faced with the fact that Flex is quite popular as a web presentation layer. Given my Java background, at first I was quite reluctant to recognize this, until new projects paved the way to learn more about this RIA technology. Since I already have a considerable amount of server-side code in Java, I was wondering if it is possible to connect Java and Flex to get the best of both worlds. Hence this article gives a walk through on how to consume a Groovy Web Service… Continue

I've heard many times about LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), yet never had the time to experiment with this technology. Somehow I always thought it was for those 'cool' developers, who actually had the opportunity to spend extra hours researching this topic. Well, the time has also come for me to enter the 'cool' club :)

Wikipedia was a good place to start, though it only gave me… Continue

This post is for those who've heard about Serlvets and Groovy, but just don't have the time to put them together. Being no guru, I've developed a number of JSPs and Servlets in my professional carrier. Every time it is the same thing.. remembering method signatures, xml descriptors, etc.. It gets even worse if you want a Servlet to print out HTML content. Let's just put it this way - Java is not designed for simple Web development. There is always the JSP approach, which is still… Continue

Have you ever wondered what supermarkets of the future would look like? Did you ever consider an online alternative to getting your groceries?



I am a surfer. I like to surf in the mornings. Then, sometimes, I do my grocery shopping. Once inside a supermarket, it is always the same thing. Looking for favorite brands, hunting for good prices, standing in lines, etc.. On average, a supermarket trip takes about 1 hour door to door. Does it have to be this way? Is there an… Continue

Besides programming all day, I also like to take pictures. One problem, is that after taking cool pictures, I tend to forget about them.. Recently I had some time on my hands to dig into Google technologies, especially their GData and Gadget API. Since I am already using things like iGoogle, Picasa, and WebAlbums, I wondered how difficult is it to put these technologies together to create a simple Slide Show Gadget. So in this post, I would like to discuss how to create your own Slide Show… Continue

Being an open source web developer for the last 10 years, I have probably tried most of open source web related technologies out there in some flavor. It all started with good old HTML. To make a long story short, now web arena is populated with things like JSP, JSTL, JSF, etc.. and notably GWT. Even though JSP is still going to stick around, GWT revolutionized my development toolbox by introducing pure Java to the world of JavaScript. Some also like to call it JavaScript hell. It is true,… Continue