#“Running Your Own Private Copy of AppInventor for Your School”
I had been getting quite concerned recently about the switchover of AppInventor from Google to MIT. For some reason Google is sticking hard to the Dec 31st shutdown date whilst MIT won't be ready to publicly host until "some time in Q1". This would leave 60 kids I'm teaching in my kids' school in the lurch for potentially a few months.
I'm on the main Group mailing list but saw nothing recently as we raced towards the deadline. But a bit of poking around in the other Groups this morning and I found a link to the test code from MIT. So this is a package for running the main AppInventor JAR on Google AppEngine. Lots of warnings about instability and frequent changes but I'm delighted they have done this.
I'm off to install it now. Here's hoping Google doesn't charge for Educational projects on AppEngine! Damn, yes they do. And the MIT teamdoesn'tknow yet what level of activity/users will kick you out of the Free Tier.
I'm neither a Java nor an AppEngine person, but I've managed to get simple Python code running there before so it should be too hard to get running.
OK, I just started reading the doc. We need a separate Linux Build server to generate the APKs etc. This shouldn't be a problem, we can sign up for a Free EC2 instance to do that. In fact, not to be ungrateful, but it'd probably be easier for most people if the whole thing ran on EC2.
Hmm, ok, I'll finish this later and write a new post on any gotchas. Suffice to say, if you ain'tcomfortablewith SDKs and building software, don't even think about it!