Vivek live and kickin'

As always I am stuck with the option of developing the application in multiple languages. I still believe that application should be small with no bloat. Recently while testing I was amazed to see that a Java application can take as little as 1500Kb memory. So my next project is in Java and not Python as I had decided earlier. I was unable to find the libraries I needed in Python while I was able to find most of the things I needed in Java. Still not sure if this project will ever see the light of day but so far I've learned quite a lot about designing desktop applications in Java. And given the fact that JVM comes preinstalled on most computers be it a Windows based or a Mac it just makes sense to design the application using Java. Will add more once I get all the things in order. I've still not started the project so its still possible that it just might end up the the "Things to do".

Over the last two days I have been researching on P2P yet again :). Last time I was working on it I got stung by STUN . I just could not make head and tail of the RFC and I was unable to find any usable implementation online. Rather I never really searched hard enough and I left that project mid way. This time around I found a really clean implementation of STUN in python another in C# and one in Java. Sure found a lot of implementation and its quite simple unless you are on a symmetric NAT setup and that is where things start getting trickier. Also realized how simple or difficult it is to create a simple P2P application. Also read up stuff on STUNT, the extra T is for TCP. STUN works on UDP and not TCP.

The thing I am working on today is more like killing 5 birds with one stone. Like I wrote last week I started with Python , but due to the work load over the last two weeks I could not do much. This Friday I got an invitation to Google App Engine and the only language they support as of now is Python. This in a way pushed me into learning python. Last month I had written about a bridge for Facebook and Open Social applications. With many new things I devised a clever plan I have started off with a facebook application for the open social platform in python using the google app engine. That is 5 technologies covered in one single shot. I started with PyFacebook but, soon realized that the library urlib2 uses sockets and PyFacebook won't work for me. I could start with a new library or hack PyFacebook and since I am an expert in Python (with less than 2 days of experience) I resorted to hacking the PyFacebook library. I have never really programed in Python and the fact that the li...

I have spent the better part of this weekend getting down and dirty with python . Also I found the GUI library I was looking for in venster . Last night I was reading about the different GUI GUI development options available for Python. There are the the usual libraries like wxPython, GTK, QT, Tk, FLTK, Swing, SWT, Swing and .net forms. All of them are good but the main problem with most of them is that they are huge and the others which are small don't look or feel native. Out of all of them I like SWT but then again if I am going to use SWT then why not just use Java. Venster looks like a very good project but seems to be dead for the last 4 years and if I can get some time I might want to work on it. The library is tiny and does not add much weight to the over all deployment package. But then again its still my second day and I've barely scratched the surface. The tutorial I was using was a little sketchy about classes in python so I still need another reference for classe...

I've tried my hand with Python a couple of time but it could never really hold my interest. But over the last few years its matured a lot and its available on multiple platforms and also one of the only languages which seems to have a binding to nearly every new library that comes out. Lets see how far I go on this adventure. And for how long python will be able to hold my interest, will I go beyond the basic "hello world" programs.