Another small update.

We had a weekend away visiting family so no work on projects was done during those days.

Prior to that I was taking a look at how to rescale bitmaps on the fly in android. This turned out to me slightly more complex than I first thought. It is easy to rescale a bitmap but the API I really wanted was scale as I rendered. Try as I could it just did not give the results I was expecting.

I am suspecting user error here. Soon it will be time to recode this stuff using openGL rather than the 2D graphics interface they provide. That is for a different game.

Oh the reason I am attempting to rescale images it to make Ponder This a little bit more user friendly. The simplest solution was to just scale the bitmap prior to rendering and keep it around. It is probably the best solutions as it means I only do the scale once. In my mind I was to be able to stretch and scale the images to create weird effects as I went.

So after taking a look at GWT for a while and deciding it looked pretty nice and something I intend to use I had come to the conculsion that the biggest thing stopping me from doing a little web app was the fact I knew very little about servers. So I have taken a reasonable dive into the app engine.

Yes it is another google product. With my use of gmail/google docs, programming with android and now my interest in gwt and the app engine you would think I was a google fan boy. I am not and certainly all this products are not without fault (I have trouble faulting gmail now that I think about it). The thing about Google products is they tend to be reasonably competent products and good documentation and importantly very easy to get started with. They just provide the tools needed for you to download and with the app engine they provide you with a free way to publish you app, well within some use quota's.

Combine this with google being a large company that uses these tools internally you can be confident the tools will get support over the long terms.

There are some counter arguments about doing what everyone else does gets you the same results of everyone else. I tend to find these arguments weak when applied to programming but strong when it comes to things like investing. I digress too much.

After reading a great deal about the app engine I find myself liking it and if it was not for the RPC stuff built into GWT I would probably like to use python to power my adventures. As it is GWT can "call" Java code running on a server with relative ease so Java it is on the server.

The plan for web app stuff is now to produce some code using both technologies and see how they feel when used in anger. I also need to look at the state of sound in the browser market. A brief look a while ago makes it appear to be in a bit of a mess. Sound is important for what I want to do so it may be I wimp out and use a  Java applet or flash for playing sounds. It looks like sound in the browser is getting better and some interesting stuff will be happening over the next couple of years. Before I make any decisions I certainly need to investigate some more.