European VAT Number validation API

07/04/2008 11:05 am by Aral Balkan in Development

EU-based businesses are required to obtain valid VAT numbers from VAT-registered entities. Unfortunately, especially for e-commerce systems, there isn't a simple way to check the validity of a European VAT number. The European Commission provides a web site where you can validate VAT numbers by entering them in an HTML form. This is not [...]

Displaying “Pay” instead of “Continue” on the PayPal site with PayPal Payments Pro UK Express Checkout

07/03/2008 11:00 am by Aral Balkan in Development

By default, PayPal Express Checkout for PayPal Payments Pro UK displays a "continue" button and sends the user back to your site, expecting a confirmation page before actually making the payment. This differs from other PayPal checkout procedures and, in my testing, I found that users expected to complete the transaction once on the PayPal [...]

ISO 3166 Alpha-2 codes for EU countries

07/03/2008 10:53 am by Aral Balkan in Development

For businesses based in the EU, it's important for VAT purposes to know whether your customers are also based in the EU. As usual, a quick Google search did not reveal a usable list of EU countries by ISO 3166 Alpha-2 code, so I whipped up my own. european_union_countries = ('AT', 'BE', 'BG', 'CY', 'CZ', [...]

Building Conference 2.0 on O’Reilly InsideRIA

06/20/2008 08:51 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

I just started my development diary for the Singularity web conference on O'Reilly InsideRIA. Check out my inaugural post: Building Conference 2.0.

Conditionally displaying sIFR text for different languages using content negotiation with Django

06/20/2008 08:29 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

I'm using sIFR on the new Singularity teaser site (not least because Mark Wubben is speaking at the conference, mind you) and ran into an issue today with extended characters (such as extended Western characters, Chinese, Japanese, etc.) not displaying properly as they weren't embedded into the Flash text field. Getting extended Western characters working is [...]

Saving a Float or GeoPt in Google App Engine? You need this patch.

06/10/2008 12:48 am by Aral Balkan in Development

This one had me scratching my head and wondering what I'd managed to corrupt in my setup today: After you save a float (or, in my case, a GeoPt instance) to the datastore, the next time you start the server (e.g., ./manage.py runserver or dev_appserver.py .), you'll get a traceback that culminates in: File "/usr/local/google_appengine/google/net/proto/ProtocolBuffer.py", line 455, [...]

Testing Google App Engine apps in Internet Explorer on Windows with Parallels on OS X

06/05/2008 04:36 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

I've had a hard time trying to get Internet Explorer on Windows (under Parallels) to connect to the Google App Engine local development server running on OS X. The interesting thing was that IE would connect to the built-in web server on the Mac without problem (using the Shared Network setting, I could also connect to [...]

Email address validation with Django and Google App Engine

06/05/2008 04:12 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

Email address validation is a quixotic affair that's sure to end with you sporting a false sense of achievement and your users in tears. Many "better mousetrap" regular-expression-based validation system on the web today are overly strict and reject perfectly valid email addresses. Beyond regular expressions and other string-based techniques, your options are to check [...]

Running the Google App Engine SDK offline without an Internet connection

06/04/2008 08:55 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

I was without a Net connection today at one point and needed to run the development server for my Google App Engine app and the server kept getting stuck while trying to check for updates. Checking the options for dev_appserver.py, I couldn't find a setting to tell it to stop checking for updates to the SDK. When [...]

ISO 3166 country codes for HTML, Python, ActionScript, Flex, JSON, and XML

06/02/2008 12:00 am by Aral Balkan in Development

Introducing Open Country Codes: easy to use ISO 3166 country codes for your apps. Why are some things just much harder than they need to be? Finding a current, easy-to-use data source for populating a country selection box, for example. Most of the clean country data out on the web is second-hand, having at one point [...]

PayPal vs. Google Checkout: countries supported

05/31/2008 11:56 am by Aral Balkan in Development

Your choice of payment processors ultimately determines the number of people who can potentially purchase your product or service. Looking at the differences between PayPal and Google Checkout, I couldn't find a comparison of the countries each processor supported so I quickly whipped up my own using the country lists each processor presents on its [...]

FlashDevelop and PHP

04/27/2008 11:34 pm by Daniel Tome's blog in Development Environment

The future of coding PHP in FlashDevelop may be quite closer than expected, thanks to user: kuzya (flashdevelop member from russia) http://www.flashdevelop.org/community/viewtopic.php?p=13082 He modified the HaXeContext plugin and now you can see your php class methods and variables in the outline pane. It was a bit buggy, and then Philippe managed to get to get a basic [...]

Google App Engine skip_files patch

04/14/2008 10:49 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

Using skip_files in app.yaml as outlined in the docs causes an error (yaml.representer.RepresenterError: cannot represent an object). There's a patch for it on the Google App Engine issue tracker. Unfortunately, when I tried to apply the patch, I got an error (I'm assuming that the copy/paste from the support forums messed something up): patching file /usr/local/google_appengine/google/appengine/api/validation.py Hunk [...]

Google App Engine: To Django or to webapp?

04/13/2008 03:26 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

Google App Engine (GAE) supports both its own framework, called webapp, and Django. So, which one do you use? As far as I can see, there isn't a compelling reason to use Django at the moment with GAE. I just can't see what benefits it offers over webapp and you have to hack Django to get it [...]

Google App Engine

04/11/2008 12:11 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

Google App Engine is a massively-scalable all-in-one application, database, and storage hosting solution released this week by Google. And it has me more excited than I can remember in a long while. Here's how it works: You write your application in Python with a WSGI-compatible web framework via the Google App Engine SDK and upload [...]

Implementing simple deep-linking in Flex (and Flash) using Django

03/24/2008 08:27 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

I'm playing around with Django (and considering whether to use it to build the back-end for Singularity). I love the regular expressions-based Front Controller that Django uses and the first thing I thought when I saw it was that it would be incredibly easy to use this to implement deep linking in Flex and Flash [...]

FeedLanguage: translate rss on the fly

03/22/2008 06:04 pm by Antti Kupila in Development

Yesterday Google released an addition I’ve been waiting for to their already impressive set of API’s, now including the Google Translate AJAX API. Hello. My name is Antti and I am an RSS addict. Seriously though, I get most of my industry news via feeds. The technology while being so simple really is extremely powerful, easy, quick [...]

JPGSizeExtractor multi image example

03/19/2008 08:32 pm by Antti Kupila in Development

I made a quick example to demonstrate the power of the JPGSizeExtractor class i wrote about a year ago. This is a demo that came up from a brief mail exchange with Richard Bacon who was looking at the class. What this does is that it loads 10 images (one at a time), parses their SOF0 [...]

PureMVC 2.0.3

03/18/2008 01:16 pm by Antti Kupila in Development

An architectural framework I’ve been using a lot recently has been updated to a new version. The version (well, not the most recent one but the jump from 1 to 2) fixes a lot of small issues that existed in 1.x, most of which were inconsistencies that caused confusion. I usually downloaded the framework before a [...]

My take on Hydra

10/03/2007 10:20 pm by Antti Kupila in Development

Loads of new stuff has been happening. As you probably know, Adobe announced loads of more goodies for us at their Adobe MAX conference. Native 3d support. Although it won’t be (most likely — according to Justin Everett-Church) hardware accelerated it will still mean that in a year or two we won’t see sites that don’t [...]

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