We ♥ web applications!
At mobalean we love to build innovative web services for Japan and the world. Our experience will help transform your ideas into successful online services.
At mobalean we love to build innovative web services for Japan and the world. Our experience will help transform your ideas into successful online services.
Mobalean is lead by Henri Servomaa, the original founder and mobile developer. At Mobalean we strive to develop services which are loved by our clients and users. By working in an agile manner, quickly adapting to changing requirements, we can deliver quickly and often.
Hailing from Finland, Henri has a long history with computers and the internet. With a background in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, he has worked in Japan as Software Developer and System Admin since 2001. In 2005, he joined a company to develop mobile sites for the Japanese market and has been involved in mobile ever since.
Cleve Lendon is a Canadian engineer who has been contracting for Mobalean. He came to Tokyo in 1994, and has lived here ever since. He has broad experience as a software developer, which includes development of mainframe software, Internet applications and mobile apps (Android and iOS). He is especially skilled at writing Java applications (vd. Simredo 4, Grafikilo 15). When not programming, Cleve enjoys improv acting and studying languages, such as Latin and Esperanto.
Our strength is crafting web services for both Japanese and international markets. We bring our technical and cultural experience to help you adapt your ideas into successful products.
We develop with Ruby on Rails and use the best agile practices and tools, such as test driven development and continuous integration to achieve quality.
We are the leading provider of technical expertise about the Japanese mobile web. Mobalean started when the smartphones were just appearing on the market. Our Keitai Web Technology Guide is a quick starting point for learning about the initial challenges of Japanese mobile development. Although the technology stacks have changed since the proliferation of iOS and Android, some of the idiosyncrasies remain. Most notably, the Japanese market is still very much dominated by the big three carriers: DoCoMo, au and Softbank. Developers can find more technical details in our Keitai-Dev Wiki.
Email address: info@mobalean.com
If you prefer to call us, feel free to do so under +81 (0)70-6251-7245
For users of Skype, please call mobalean
A bit more on hosting git repositories:
I first tried to simply go with a shared directory on a server, i.e. a directory owned by a specific unix group, the group sticky bit switched on, and all users who are supposed to have access to the repository in that group. This works to some degree, but has some drawbacks as git does not auto-magically handle file permissions correctly. So on a system using a umask of 022 (which I guess is a majority of systems?), newly created files are not writable by the group, only by the user who created the files.
So I decided to go with gitosis, which not only eliminates the file permission problem, but is also a more flexible solution as it doesn't require an actual system user for everyone who is supposed to have access to your git repositories. Instead it relies on your user's ssh keys for authentication plus an ACL to determine read/write access to repositories.
There is already a good setup manual, so I won't repeat everything here. On a server running Debian Etch, it boils down to the following commands (make sure you have the backports repository installed):
# apt-get -t etch-backports install gitosis # sudo -H -u gitosis gitosis-init < YOUR_PUBLIC_SSH_KEY
That is the setup work required on the server. Then you can clone gitosis' admin repository on your local system:
\$ git clone gitosis@YOUR_SERVER_HOSTNAME:gitosis-admin.gitI'll again refer you to the setup manual on how to configure gitosis. Just one thing I stumbled over: When adding new users, make sure that you name the key files correctly. I forgot the .pub extension, and wondered why those users didn't get access...