Jesse Peterson

So, July 11, 2008, came and went. What happened on July 11? The iPhone 3G came out.

But I don’t have an iPhone. The other big thing is that the Apple iPhone App Store opened. But I don’t have a Mac, so I can’t run the emulator or create my own apps for the emulator.

So, I celebrated by creating my first Android app.

This is the “Hello, World” version of an Android app running in the emulator. It was very easy to make. What made it easier for me is that Android apps are written in Java. (I am a Java developer by day.) The “Getting Started” tutorial even shows you how to use Eclipse.

I have only created the sample app so far, but it looks pretty easy for a Java developer to write an “Activity“. But, of coarse, the apps currently can only run in the emulator. But the emulator can be integrated very easily into Eclipse.

Though, it is not like having real hardware like the Apple iPhone.

I have successfully used S3Fox Organizer with the current “littles3” source code. S3Fox Organizer is a Firefox extension which provides a simple interface for managing files with Amazon S3. To get it to work, I needed to control the resolving of “http://s3.amazonaws.com”, which is the URL that S3Fox Organizer is coded to use. I edited my machines “hosts” file, C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts on Windows, to have s3.amazonaws.com resolve to 127.0.0.1, localhost. I have “littles3″ running within Tomcat. I have it running as the “ROOT” application so that there is no application context. I also have Apache running with mod_jk connecting to Tomcat.

This definitely takes advanced skills to get running and “littles3″ isn’t complete yet, but this is a good integration test. The current “littles3″ source code has ACL support now. It still needs to implement metadata and the ability to “provision” user accounts. But it is at a personally usable state now.

I have launched a project, “littles3“, on Google Code. This project is a Java web application which provides a storage service based on the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) API.

So far, I have implemented a StorageEngine which stores content to the local file system. It currently does the basic storage function outlined in the S3 api. What isn’t implemented yet?

1. ACL
2. Custom metadata

Why am I doing this? I think that Amazon S3 is a pretty neat thing. It provides hosted storage at a very reasonable rate. But there may be times when you want to store your data locally but still use the Amazon S3 API. This server will do that.