Random Thoughts

In my last post about creating an Appharbor notification bot, I described about the problem domain, the solution approaches and how the end to end scenario works.This post would dig deeper into the implementation aspects of the solution. To start with we need to understand the two esential ingredients for this recipe Appharbor Service hooks : Appharbor Service hooks are the building block for the solution. Appharbor provides capability, where it can post to any public url with status of a build on completion. Service hooks are available for events Build Success. Build failure. XMPP protocol : XMPP is a protocol used for Instant Messaging (IM) communication. It allows us to relay messages to the users IM client using XMPP servers (in our case Google Talk messaging servers). With the understanding on these two concept we are ready to dive into the nitty gritty  of the solution. Assuming that the user did the initial configurations to setup notifications (see ...

Appharbor recently ran a contest to encourage developers to use their API and showcase the API capabilities. Based on some ideas floated by the Appharbor team I too decided to build something useful\interesting for Appharbor platform.I decided to create a desktop notification client which can notify user when the build is complete, its status in terms of success or failure. How Appharbor works is that you push your code to a git repo supported by Appharbor ( github , bitbucket etc). As soon as the checkin is done, Appharbor pulls the code base build it, and updates the running website. It's like a single click deployment! I started to explore my option for a desktop client and some of the options I though of were Build a desktop windows app and integrate with the Appharbor API.  This approach was the most flexible approach. I have full control of features and capabilities, but would take a good amount of time to develop. Use third party desktop notification apps like...

My last exercise on deploying Nerddinner on IronFoundry helped me a lot to understand the platforms capabilities. Time to do the same thing on AppHarbor , another PaaS player in .Net space. AppHarbor tries to emulate Heroku in .Net space. They are the ' Azure done right ' brigade. As a developer I just needs to push code either to AppHarbor or some of the supported repositories such as CodePlex, GitHub, BitBucket and AppHarbor does the rest. AppHarbor Builds the code. Runs unit tests Deploys the application on AppHarbor’s application servers (backed by Amazon EC2 ). Other than that it also provides all the standard benefits as provided by most PaaS players. To gain first hand experience on AppHarbor I decided to port Nerddinner onto AppHarbor. I already had the Nerddinner codebase in github so i could start right away. Creating Account   The first step was to register my account with AppHarbor. Once registration is complete we get a single instance under the...