Scotch Malt Whisky Society distillery list for Android

Posted January 31, 2010 by Alastair
Tagged As: | Categories: Miscellaneous | 1 Comment

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society is a wonderful place. They won’t tell you which distilleries their bottlings are from, though. (Well, they give you big hints, but as a relative amateur they are insufficient for me for some of the smaller distilleries, at least.)

If you have an Android phone then help is at hand, for in a fit of incredible niche-dom (this is likely to be of interest to about, oooh, eight people), I have created an app that lists the distilleries and their corresponding numbers, allowing you to sort either by number or by name.

Download it from the Android Market (search for smws), by pointing your phone at the QR code below or by clicking this link from your handset.


Wicket on Google’s App Engine

Posted April 10, 2009 by Alastair
Tagged As: | Categories: Apache Wicket, Java, Open Source | 2 Comments

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last week, you’ll probably have noticed that Google’s App Engine now lets you run Java web apps. This includes those created with Apache Wicket, although you’ll need to tweak a couple of settings to make it play nicely.

App Engine logo

The App Engine sandbox imposes some restrictions. The most notable of these is that you cannot run background threads. Here’s how to make Wicket play ball:

  • Make sure you’re running in deployment mode (this will disable the background thread that checks for modifications to your resource files, and is what you’ll want for deploying to a remote site like this anyway).
  • Override newSessionStore() in your WebApplication subclass and return a new HttpSessionStore(this). (The default DiskPageStore uses a background thread and writes files, neither of which are supported in the App Engine’s sandbox.)
  • Enable session support in appengine-web.xml.

App Engine for Java is in limited beta, but if you’ve been to the London Wicket Users Group at Google and would like me to wangle an account for you, please e-mail me (details on the About page).

Snow

Posted February 5, 2009 by Alastair
Tagged As: | Categories: Miscellaneous | 2 Comments

It’s been snowy in London. I went out on Sunday and took some photos. I like this one the most. ;-)

London Wicket Users Group at Google on October 1st

Posted August 29, 2008 by Alastair
Tagged As: | Categories: Apache Wicket, Java, Open Source | No Comments

October’s London Wicket User Group meet-up is happening on Wednesday 1st at Google’s office in Victoria. It’s shaping up to be a really good event.

We’re pleased to have Ari Zilka (who founded Terracotta) coming along. He will be giving a talk, as will Richard Wilkinson, who has interesting things to say about integrating Wicket with Guice and JPA. There will be a couple of other talks and some nice demos, too. If you’re wondering what it’s like to write real code in Wicket, don’t miss it.

If you’d like to come along, please wander over to the jWeekend site to sign up.

Wicket is on the Google Open Source blog

Posted April 8, 2008 by Alastair
Tagged As: | Categories: Apache Wicket, Java, Open Source | 1 Comment

The latest London Wicket get-together has been featured on the Google Open Source blog. Check it out for links to photos, etc. I’ve also put up some presentations and code samples from the event, including our dynamic AJAX image-cropper component.