SSL / TLS on Google App Engine Custom Domains

Using Wildcard Certificates signed by GoDaddy

SSL and TLS -- technologies used to encrypt and secure network transmissions -- and Custom Domains hosted on Google App Engine can be a challenge to configure.  This article describes the nuances and gotchas that can come up during the deployment of SSL certificates on Custom Domains hosted on Google App Engine.

Everything I needed to know about Software Architecture...I learned from Google App Engine

Software Architecture is a sweeping field of study with an immeasurable range of opinions on how best to approach its execution. While designing a cloud-hosted project involving Google App Engine, I came to realize that there are quite a few similarities between approaches to App Engine development and those applicable to Software Architecture, generally.

Below, I've explored a few concepts that get at my own observations of the connections between Google's cloud application platform and the larger school of thought. If you're familiar with one, but not the other, fear not! Descriptions of each App Engine component are provided, with an explanation of the corresponding architectural concept appended in italics.

KDA Web Technologies Wins Recognition from SUNY New Paltz!

New Paltz based KDA is honored to have received recognition for its contribution to the SUNY New Paltz internship program at a lunch event held on campus on Friday April 11th. KDA has hosted interns for the last year at their office at 211 Main St. New Paltz; Dante Gutierrez and Hamza Bentebbaa, who also received recognition, were two of the first interns KDA accepted.

Heartbleed, meet Google App Engine

The Heartbleed Overflow Issue is a bug that adversely affects network security. By exploiting this vulnerability, encrypted data may become compromised during transmission. Individuals responsible for hosting web applications that require a high level of security may find themselves scrambling to find ways to patch their servers so as to minimize Heartbleed's impact on their operations. That is, those individuals who aren't hosting their applications on Google App Engine.

Back to Basics: Template-Driven Documentation

Documentation is something that some see as a necessary evil; others look at it as a needless chore better left to someone else; others still see documentation as the indicator of a job well done. Documentation templates can help bring all of these different perspectives together and write quality software that's easier and less expensive to maintain and extend.

Alert: Google's API Changes Affect Account Synchronization

The Google tools provided for synchronizing accounts between your organization and your Google Apps domain are changing. These changes require developers to rebuild the applications used to perform this synchronization.

Fashion-Forward Retail Giant Requires a Unique Marriage of Salesforce.com and Google Apps for Business

In spring 2013, several of KDA’s developers worked on a unique project for one of the world's leading brands in high-end retail. Headquartered in London, the fashion-forward retail giant tasked the team with integrating Google Apps user data into an existing intranet solution built on Salesforce.com’s Chatter platform, which was the centerpiece of the company’s internal collaboration strategy.

The challenge: Authorize Google's extensive JavaScript API client libraries to populate recent activity streams from a user’s Google Drive, Calendar and Gmail account, alongside a Google Talk-powered Chat box (surfaced using XMPP), into a highly customized set of Apex-driven VisualForce pages resting atop Salesforce’s enterprise social network and collaboration platform.

Piece of cake, right? The case study outlines the company’s requirements and how each was addressed by the development team.

Case study by Wes Dean

Much of the retail-focused company’s success lies in the strength of its brand — in quality, recognition, value and innovation — both in the eyes of its customers and, internally, for all of its employees. Thus, it was critical that each component of the solution we delivered adhered to the company’s brand guidelines and served to visually reinforce the values pent up in its corporate identity, whether in the choice of fonts used for lists of Google Drive files or the background and accent colors chosen for the embedded chat UI.