The Google App Engine is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while, allowing developers to create Web apps that leverage Google’s backend. That should get anyone reading this excited about it.

Also – or naturally, depending on your point of view – Google App Engine decided to go with Python as its language of choice, which is pretty much the coolest language ever. Anyone reading this with good taste in programming languages should be even more excited.

In addition, App Engine also includes the Django Web application framework – specifically its template system. If you have good taste in programming languages and web frameworks, you may have just fallen over your chair.

Products and technologies like Google App Engine remind me how cool it would be play with stuff like this all day if I didn’t need to work for a living. In the mean time, I’m looking forward to giving Google App Engine a spin on an upcoming weekend.

Check it out here.

Tonight while working on a proposal I examined a customer’s case study region of their site. The case studies the customer posted were strictly in PDF format with no HTML alternative. When I browse the internet looking for information I’m often miffed when content is put entirely into a PDF.

Usually when I stumble on PDF content it’s by accident and without visual warning that I’m about to download an entire document. Not only does the download clutter my hard drive but it changes the usability experience on the Web site.

As usual, I resorted to a Google search in an effort to find a good study on the pros and cons of strictly PDF content mixed with HTML content. To my surprise I found little to no information about this topic.

So I came up with my own short list.

First the Pros

• Total control of the design
• Document is portable offline
• Can email it to a collegue

That’s it…. now to the Cons

• On PCs the user needs to open Adobe Acrobat. Thank God I have a Mac
• The user-experience has now changed
• Loss of SEO benefits over HTML
• Content often goes stale, while the HTML stays fresh using a CMS
• Another file added to my computer rather then the cache

So, now I ask you good reader, where do you stand?

It’s not hard to be a fan of Mozilla – they have some great products, offer some great resources like the Mozilla Development Center, and supports Web standards in general.

Here are two projects that Mozilla heads up but haven’t received as much press as some of their other efforts, probably because they are still under development.

XULRunner. The best introduction to XULRunner may be Wikipedia’s: “XULRunner is a runtime environment developed by the Mozilla Foundation for providing a common back-end for XUL applications.”

XULRunner is my personal favorite of upcoming Mozilla projects. It will allow developers to use XUL – Mozilla’s “XML User Interface Language” – to build cross-platform (desktop) applications that can do all sorts of cool things. XUL should be a technology that comes naturally to most Web developers.

While XUL provides the framework to build the applications themselves, XULRunner will provide an easy means of installing, removing, and upgrading these applications. In sum, XULRunner (with XUL) will make it easier for developers with certain skill sets to deploy desktop applications. Here’s a list of some XULRunner applications.

Prism. Mozilla describes Prism as one of, or a result of

“a series of experiments to bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop apps and to explore new usability models as the line between traditional desktop and new web applications continues to blur.“

To summarize: Prism will help bridge experiences of desktop and Web applications. It will allow users to run Web applications directly on the Desktop, fully integrated into the desktop itself, wither the user is running Linux, Mac, or Windows. Prism also wants to let Web applications use features of the user’s environment or hardware – such as offline data storage and graphics cards.

I’m pretty excited about these projects and look forward to observing the development of these applications as they more forward.

I love programming and related activities – creating websites, making scripts to make my computer run better, and all that stuff. I also love learning new technologies. I have a list of technologies that are high priorities on my to-learn list – Pylons and the ASP.NET MVC framework are two of them.

Then there are others which I’m on the fence about; although I would like to learn them, they are few notches down on there interest scale. Here are some of these technologies:

Silverlight and Flash. These are two technologies do pretty much the same thing and I’d like to learn them both. Someday.

My excitement over these technologies ebbs and flows; sometime’s I’m really excited about Silverlight because my skill set with .NET would mean a smooth transition, but it’s another Microsoft technology – and despite being paid to develop .NET code, I don’t want to be pidgin-holed. Flash sometimes appeals very strongly to me and I’d probably pick up ActionScript incredibly fast. Still, I’m such a JavaScript enthusiast that I enjoy trying to match what flash can do with JavaScript alone.

Ruby. I get excited about Ruby every time I hear someone I know – in real life – talk about it. I’ve become immune to rants and raves it receives in the blogosphere.

Ruby seems like an interesting language and is probably fun to program with; but it goes down a few notches in my eagerness-to-learn scale because I my pet language – which I already know – is Python, which is super fast and easy to develop with. I’ve also grown to appreciate the Python community. Ruby is still on my want-to-learn list, but it’s not high because Python fits my needs perfectly.

Java. Java seems to have a reputation of being outdated by its flashy and speedy competitor, .NET, but Java is extremely versatile. Plus, it’s got an important leg-up on .NET – it’s cross platform.

Knowing VB.NET and C#, Java’s syntax is very understandable to me. I would probably pick it up very easily. I’ve played with open source projects and other software coded in Java and I’ve been in impressed with its quickness.

BSD. I love Linux, but I’ve never been able to get in too deep with BSD. Of all the technologies on this list, this would probably be the one I’d learn first. BSD is an extremely important technology to me, and being the cousin of my beloved Linux, it would be really neat to be a wizard at it. This almost didn’t make the list, it was almost added to my “definitely want to-learn” list.

It’s too bad that I have to work for a living; if I didn’t, I’d be guru in each of these technologies. I’d be a famous published author on each of them, and people would stop to ask me for my autograph.

Technology moves fast – but sometimes, not that fast. “Old”, outdated books on languages and technology often have valuable insight or content. These books may be a couple years old or a previous edition – or a book from an obscure publisher or author that never received the publicity it deserved. On Amazon.com, these books tend to be cheap and sometimes plentiful. And they are potential treasure chests of information and code.

I have found Amazon.com to be an invaluable resource for these types of books as I explore different programming languages and techniques. Here’s why: Amazon’s reseller program offers tons of books – often used, perhaps a version older – for super cheap. This may not be news for most people out there, but how valuable these books can be to your learning may be.

For example, I’ve found the out-of-print “Beginning ASP.NET 1.1 in C#” By Matthew MacDonald to be an excellent summary of programming ASP.NET in C#, and still widely available. It’s also good for brushing up on Mono’s ASP.NET implementation, too, which is somewhere between 1.1 and 2.0. ASP.NET (actually .NET) is one of those technologies that the basic, foundational skills learned in in “early” versions (Microsoft still supports early versions such as 1.1, “For as long as their clients demand”) are usually very relevent and compatible with later versions, too. And the enterprise installations of early versions of ASP.NET is still incredibly high.

Also, if you increase your skill set by reading code, there is no shame or nothing “inherently wrong” with the code in older versions of books. They can be as relevant as ever and can be good examples to learn from. Legacy code doesn’t update itself – so it pays (literally, sometimes) to know and understand how older code works, too. Speed of adoption can lag behind the latest releases of books, and its likely you will come across older code at some point as a programmer, if not daily or weekly.

I have “old” books I’ve picked up from Amazon.com on subjects as diverse as ASP.NET, C#, PHP, SQL, Python, Linux, Apache, and a handful of other subjects. And many of them have been invaluable references to the code or technology they explain.