Is there a way to debug (specifically step-through) a Google app engine application that has been deployed to the cloud. The reason I am asking is that there are certain things that either cannot be debugged locally or require work-arounds to test locally (eg. CRON Jobs).
Specifically I want to do this using Eclipse.
Update: as of 2015 it is possible to debug AppEngine Java applications if they run on Managed VMs. Also, the debugger is a web-based hosted debugger - no support yet for your popular IDE. See Cloud Debugger.
No, this can not be done.
One of the reasons why this most probably will never be available is that GAE is a distributed cloud system, where an "application" can have multiple instances running in parallel and there is no guarantee that consequent requests (e.g. a user session) would be served by the same instance. So there would be no way to know to which instance to connect debugger to.
You might want to star this acknowledged bug
Related
I know that with R you can run RStudio as a browser instance directly from a server/cloud instance, so you access the IDE via browser, and that IDE has access to files/data available on that instance (similar to what Jupyterlab does).
Similarly i wonder if there is a way to run VSCode (or some other full feature IDE) as a browser instance on something like a google dataproc, so instead of using Jupyter to run code and access data, you would use the IDE.
I realize there are ways to run a local instance of an IDE and connect to a server/cloud instance, but in some cases these connections are blocked by firewalls and you have no way of running code on the instance other than via browser/jupyter, so i was wondering if there was some other way to do this.
As #guillaume blaquiere suggested :
Cloud Workstation is the brand new feature is designed for that
Fully managed development environments built to meet the needs of security-sensitive enterprises. It enhances the security of development environments while accelerating developer onboarding and productivity.
Access secure and fast development environments anytime via browser or local IDE
Enable administrators to easily provision, scale, manage, and secure development environments
Customize development environments with your preferred IDE and through custom container images
I'm building a web app with Backbone.js (I'm not tied to Backbone yet though). I need a back-end framework only for persistence to a database via a RESTful API. However, I also need to able to deploy it as a 'desktop' app for off-line use, i.e. running a local server and launching a browser window, but I don't want users to have to start a server from the command line to run the application.
I can use SQLite as a database since it's only a single user application, it's just the framework that I'm stuck on. I have looked at the following:
Rails and Django: Default web servers are too flimsy, requires Ruby/Python and runs from the command line. I'm aware of the Bitnami stacks but at 99mb it's too big of a dependency and not exactly hidden from the user.
Sproutcore: Run from command line, also too bulky.
Pyjamas Desktop - Depends on MSHTML which I suspect limits my ability to use HTML5 features.
I'm leaning towards creating a Java app that starts a Scala/Lift server instance and opens a web browser, then sits in the system tray (kind of like WAMP). Is anyone familiar with a tool or framework built for user-friendly deployment as a standalone desktop app?
I do not know if PHP is an option for you? Then I would recommend phpdock.
web2py has a standalone deploy-to-desktop feature with no dependency on Python: http://web2py.com/books/default/chapter/29/14#How-to-distribute-your-applications-as-binaries
As Eydun said, phpdock is an option but it's commercially licensed .
I settled on using Java/Spring/H2/Hibernate/Jetty. I find that Jetty serves requests VERY quickly so the application looks real-time when launched in a browser. There is a tutorial on embedding the Jetty server here. I imagine it's quite trivial to build a GUI that launches the server and a browser.
Another Java option is to use the Play Framework, which may be more at home to those coming from a Django/Rails background. However, the documentation for "creating a standalone version of your application" for Play 2.0+ indicates that they have ditched using Java EE containers (Tomcat/Jetty) and WAR files in favor of running the JARs with the bundled copy of JBoss Netty, so it may take a bit of work to get it running the way you want it.
I would recommend the Play Framework approach if you're OK with using/learning Scala.
Im interested in doing some development from my iPad, and one idea I had would be to code from the safari browser. Does anyone know of a way to set up eclipse on a cloud-based server, so that it can be accessed from a browser?
I believe, you will need the following parts to make it work
The cloud server must be based on one of the supported Eclipse Target Environments.
The cloud server provider must support UI based on some sort of remote desktop - e.g. VNC. Be aware that many cloud providers does not allow UI.
iPad must support the same remote desktop technology. There seem to be many VNC implementations for iPad...
I guess the difficult part is to find a cloud server to use. Though you, as an alternative, could use any PC with an VNC server where you have Internet access...
I habe a web role in azure. It is running fine locally in development app fabric, but fails silently when deployed to Azure (simply no response at all for any request).
I assume it's some problem with the web.config, but that is happening so early that it occurs already before I can set up the diagnostic stuff in global asax. As said, it's working fine locally, but there is simply no response at all from the azure system.
How can I find out what specifically is wrong to be able to solve it like get the exception text, stack trace, IIS application system error log or anything that could hint me to the real problem?
The absolute first thing that is run in a Web role is not your application but the OnStart() method in WebRole.cs in your Azure project. This is the place to add code to monitor your Web site.
The standard technique is to copy your application trace logs and the Windows event logs to Azure table storage, together (if appropriate) with instrumentation for CPU usage, IIS statistics and what-have-you.
A good introduction to this is here: http://blog.bareweb.eu/2011/01/beginning-azure-diagnostics/
and a good followup with details on the specifics you'll need in your application is here: http://blog.bareweb.eu/2011/03/implementing-azure-diagnostics-with-sdk-v1-4/
which remains applicable for the Azure SDK 1.5.
Once you are capturing diagnostics, you can either use Visual Studio to view them directly, or you can use a tool like the Cerebrata Azure Diagnostics Manager to graph and filter them automatically. This tool is a little rough around the edges (especially for larger systems with multiple instances: the graphs aren't really useful) but is as good as it gets at the moment.
An alternative approach is to use Remote Desktop to connect to the remote instance and do some spelunking in the Windows event logs and suchlike. You can also use the Internet Explorer browser that's on the remote instance to directly connect locally to the application and see any errors etc. that may otherwise be hidden.
Personally I'd only do this if the diagnostic storage mechanism isn't working: production servers really should have remote desktop access turned off altogether to reduce the possible surface area for external attack.
Setting up diagnostics is the best long term solution to dealing with tracking errors in your application. If you want something a little more ad-hoc you can either catch the errors and write them to blob storage or use your own light weight trace listener.
I love Heroku but I would prefer to develop in Scala rather than Ruby on Rails.
Does anyone know of any services like Heroku that work with Scala?
UPDATE: Heroku now officially supports Scala - see answers below for links
As of October 3rd 2011, Heroku officially supports Scala, Akka and sbt.
http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2011/10/3/scala/
Update
Heroku has just announced support for Java.
Update 2
Heroku has just announced support for Scala
Also
Check out Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.
To deploy Java applications using
Elastic Beanstalk, you simply:
Create your application as you
normally would using any editor or IDE
(e.g. Eclipse).
Package your
deployable code into a standard Java
Web Application Archive (WAR file).
Upload your WAR file to Elastic
Beanstalk using the AWS Management
Console, the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse,
the web service APIs, or the Command
Line Tools.
Deploy your application.
Behind the scenes, Elastic Beanstalk
handles the provisioning of a load
balancer and the deployment of your
WAR file to one or more EC2 instances
running the Apache Tomcat application
server.
Within a few minutes you will
be able to access your application at
a customized URL (e.g.
http://myapp.elasticbeanstalk.com/).
Once an application is running,
Elastic Beanstalk provides several
management features such as:
Easily deploy new application versions
to running environments (or rollback
to a previous version).
Access
built-in CloudWatch monitoring metrics
such as average CPU utilization,
request count, and average latency.
Receive e-mail notifications through
Amazon Simple Notification Service
when application health changes or
application servers are added or
removed.
Access Tomcat server log
files without needing to login to the
application servers.
Quickly restart
the application servers on all EC2
instances with a single command.
Another strong contender is Cloud Foundry. One of the nice features of Cloud Foundry is the ability to have a local version of "the cloud" running on your laptop so you can deploy and test offline.
I started working on the exact same thing as what you said a few weeks ago. I use Lift, which is a great framework and has a lot of potential, on top of Linux chroot environment.
I'm done with a demo version, but Linux chroot is not that stable (nor secure), so I'm now switching to FreeBSD jail on Amazon EC2, and hopefully it'll be done soon.
http://lifthub.net/
There are also other Java hosting environment including VMForce mentioned above.
If you are looking for a custom setup which also has the ease of deployment that heroku offers: http://dotcloud.com. They are invite only right now but I was given access in under three days. I am working on a Lift/MongoDB project there and it works well.
Off the top of my head, only VMForce comes to mind, but its not available yet. This will be a Java-oriented service, so that probably means you'll have to spend a wee bit of time figuring out how to package the app.
For more discussion, there was a debate about this in 2008.
I'm not entirely sure if it's really suitable or not, but people have deployed Scala applications to Google App Engine, for example http://mawson.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/first-steps-with-scala-on-google-app-engine/
Actually you can run scala on heroku right now. You don't believe it?
https://github.com/lstoll/heroku-playframework-scala
I'm not sure the tricks lstoll has used are legit but using the
new cedar platform where you can run custom processes and some
ingenious Gemfile hacking he has managed to bootstrap the Java
play platform into a process. Seems to work as he has a live
site running a test page.
Stax cloud service offers preconfigured lift project skeleton. Also, there is a tutorial on how to deploy lift project to appengine.