Archive for November, 2010

Titanium App wins Wufoo API Contest

Monday, November 22nd, 2010

We want to give out some kudos to one of our newest hires, Rick Blalock, who just recently joined Appcelerator as one of our Professional Services Engineers. Rick just recently won the Wufoo API Contest with his entry called Pico which was developed using Appcelerator’s own Titanium Platform.

Pico is an iPhone app that’s designed for interacting with your Wufoo account while on the move. You can view all your forms in a searchable list, while seeing how many entries each form had that day. Tapping a form allows you to browse its entries, where you can view individual submissions (this is also searchable) or add a new ones right on your phone. Reports feature allows you to view data via the Chart, Number, Text, and Datagrid widgets. Access to the the user accounts in Wufoo is also available through the UI to let you see each user’s access levels and email them for your convenience.

For his efforts Rick was awarded an honest to god battle axe. We’re proud to have Rick as part of the Appcelerator team and look forward to his future creations as part of our staff.

Sunday morning outage

Monday, November 15th, 2010

Hello everyone,

My name is Chung Liu, and I recently joined Appcelerator in the role of Director of Cloud Engineering. Our developer site was down for a few hours on Sunday morning (November 15), and I would like to give our users an update on what happened and what we are doing to prevent outages going forward.

Early on Sunday morning, one of the servers that handles HTTP API calls stopped releasing database connections. After a short time, this caused other servers to stop working properly because they couldn’t establish their own connections to the database.

The problem was resolved by removing the misbehaving server from the load balancer pool, which directed HTTP API traffic to the remaining servers in the cluster. For redundancy and scalability, we have a cluster of load balanced servers just to handle HTTP API calls. Later, we spun up a replacement server instance in Amazon EC2, restoring the cluster to the original number of servers.

This outage also uncovered a bug in our client code for forward and reverse geolocation cloud services, which caused some iPhone applications to crash during the downtime. This issue is being resolved in the upcoming 1.5 release, and we will ensure that this type of problem does not happen again.

We are very sorry for the frustration and missed productivity caused by this downtime. Going forward, we are taking measures to address the root causes of this outage, and prevent other outages in the future. We will continue to improve our monitoring systems and internal processes so we can detect more issues earlier and resolve them quicker. We will also increase the scope and coverage of our failover tests to verify that our high-availability architecture can stand up to more diverse types of scenarios.

If you have any more questions about the outage, please email support@appcelerator.com.

Thanks,

Chung Liu

Director of Cloud Engineering

Appcelerator, Inc.

New Titanium Desktop Release is coming soon!

Wednesday, November 10th, 2010

Dear Titanium Desktop developers,

We have been reading your posts and emails and we’re working hard on the finishing touches on a new Titanium Desktop release.

The highlights of the new upcoming Ti Desktop 1.1 Release are:

  • Increased stability -  many bugs fixed toward that goal
  • Key performance improvements in some areas
  • Updated Webkit with improved HTML 5 support

We planning the details of the release now and we are targeting the first week of December for the release of Ti Desktop 1.1.

Be assured that the Titanium Desktop development is alive and well, and we are  adding resources to the team.

As you likely know we use the Titanium Desktop to build our Titanium Developer application.  And also it is being used by major clients for key cross platform applications which have a huge installed base.

Thanks for your support and your patience, and stay tuned for a new Titanium Release 1.1 near you!

Code Strong!

Ralf Pfeiffer

Director of Platform Engineering

Appcelerator, Inc.

New release of Titanium (1.4.2) supports Apple’s new IOS SDK 4.2

Wednesday, November 10th, 2010

Hello everyone,

I know a number of you have been curious about the recent  news from Apple regarding the new IOS SDK 4.2, and how we will respond with Titanium Mobile.

The good news is that we have been working through some issues with IOS SDK 4.2,  and preparing for a Titanium release today.

As you are reading this blog, we have released a Titanium Mobile 1.4.2 SDK which is IOS 4.2 compatible. Our 1.4.2 release is based on the former 1.4.1.1 release, with just what is necessary to support IOS SDK 4.2. This release does not include the great work we’ve been doing in the past months toward our upcoming R1.5 release.

For those of you who need the latest code, and are pulling from our Git repository for IOS development, you will be happy to know that our “master branch” also supports IOS 4.2. We have been working hard to get ready for a Release 1.5 in the near future. Note that although there are many great fixes and improvements, we still have defects we need to address before we release Titanium 1.5.

So, feel free to download Apple’s IOS 4.2 and Titanium Mobile 1.4.2, and start creating awesome apps for this new IOS platform.

Code Strong!

Ralf Pfeiffer

Director of Platform Engineering

Appcelerator, Inc.