2009-11-10

Issues in Serving iUI Sample Apps using Mercurial

Since Google Code does not provide general-purpose web hosting to projects, iUI has long used the SVN repository as an HTTP server to server the sample webapps. For example the URL http://iui.googlecode.com/svn/tags/REL-0.30/samples/music.html serves the Music Sample from the 0.30 release of iUI. We had been using the tag REL-current to always server the latest stable release. We can't (easily) do this with Mercurial because the tag is passed in the query string. The URL http://iui.googlecode.com/hg/samples/music.html?r=REL-current will serve the HTML for the version tagged 'REL-current, but will then try to pull iui.css and iui.js from the 'tip' (at the time of writing, iui.css and iui.js are in a different directory on the 'tip' then they are in REL-current, so the files are not even found. If they hadn't been moved, then the wrong versions would be pulled.)

I'm not sure there is an easy solution to this problem, but if anyone has any ideas, please let me know.

Since we are now deploying the samples to Google App Engine (at http://iui-js.appspot.com), we'll have to have a 'tip' version and a 'REL-current' version on AppEngine, as well. Google App Engine does support deploying multiple versions of a webapp, but I think this is only intended for fallback purposes and not designed for serving multiple versions simultaneously. The other advantage to using AppEngine, of course, is that the dynamic pages used in the Samples and Tests will actually work.

2 comments:

  1. You can have several versions concurrently available in appengine, although only one can be the default. In your case, the default version would handle iui-js.appspot.com but if you had uploaded the app with version: tip and another with version: current you can access them respectively as http://tip.iui-js.appspot.com and http://current.iui-js.appspot.com even if the default version is really version: live at [live.]iui-js.appspot.com

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  2. I thought I had found that multiple versions on GAE were not a viable solution, but I will try it again...

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