FolkertsFotografie is online
To my surprise, my wife's web site on Google App Engine had a surprisingly bad uptime this month as measured by Pingdom (about 96% uptime). This helped to push me to actually get a site out on Heroku using the Play 2.0 framework. The result is Folkerts Fotografie.
To improve performance and security, the site is using CloudFlare and their content delivery network, cdnjs. One of the fun things about cdnjs is that they only have about 4 paragraphs of text and even so, their advice to use protocol relative URLs for resources taught me another useful trick.
We are also using Twitter Bootstrap 2.0 and Kickstrap to build the UI. My only gripe with Bootstrap is that you end up adding non-semantic CSS classes like 'span3'. LIke any big complex library , bootstrap has a learning curve. But with some help at stackoverflow, I was able to get past most of my issues.
From a coding standpoint, the site is basically built from Atom Feeds from Some Other Host's Content; news = Blogger posts and the home page and galleries are feeds from Picasa, at least for now. I have both client-side Ajax and a server-side web hook to get Blogger content; this was more to force me to use both techniques. Given how both Heroku and tumblr are on EC2, it may improve performance to use tumblr/imgur rather that Blogger/Picasa; its pretty hard to beat the latency of same datacenter.
In summary, I have learned a great deal about some of the new development tools and I am for the most part quite impressed. I suspect that I would have been better off with Liftweb, which is more stable and secure, but perhaps this will give me a chance to do an A/B comparison between these two Scala web frameworks. This is a simple site, but still enough to help me learn some new tools.
