Google App Engine

Now that Google has opened up Google App Engine, I finally have an account. I never received one during the initial releases. I've been working on a simple Python application intended to manage teams. Essentially the type of team I'm intending the site to manage are youth sports teams.


iTeam

For now though I basically have the classic file maintenance pattern as I like to think of it. Essentially it is a form with a list of inserted records below the form on the same page. Very simple. However, I've been coding this same pattern in various formats for my entire career it seems. This go-around though it is in Python using Google's version of Django which I have been learning. The real power though is the ability to define a data model within Python code and then let the app engine manage the physical representation and deployment of the data. That's a lot of work off-loaded.

My goal is to integrate the site with other Google services so that a coach could create a team and then allow families to join the team in order to view the team schedule, contact list, share photos, etc. There's lots more to do.

Mario Kart Control Schemes: FIGHT

Mario Kart Control Schemes: FIGHT

InfoQ: HBase Leads Discuss Hadoop, BigTable and Distributed Databases

InfoQ: HBase Leads Discuss Hadoop, BigTable and Distributed Databases

a new app server

I am adding this to my list to take a look at.

InfoQ: SpringSource Launches New Application Server without Java EE

High Performance Web Sites :: Cuzillion

High Performance Web Sites :: Cuzillion

This is a major time savings for testing and site optimization.

waiting on account

I've written my first mini-app in Python for Google App Engine and now I'm just waiting on an account. After so many years of Java, Python feels strange and awkward. I'll need quite a bit more time with the language before it feels more comfortable.

Google App Engine and Python

I'm setting out to learn Python and Django in order to make some use of Google App Engine. I spent an hour yesterday working through the helloworld sample that results in a reasonable guest book application. I don't want to sound like an ad for Google but there are many compleing reasons to give this technology a try. The specific reason that interests me at this stage is the ability to take an idea for a site and actually have someplace to host it for free. Maybe there are other offerings similar to this?

The only feedback I have so far is that editing just an html template does not cause the page to be reloaded by the Python server. At least this is the case for me on OS X 10.4. Maybe it works differently on Leopard? Instead making a change to the .py class file does cause the html to be refreshed.

Also, I don't know any Python yet! Java clouds my vision for now.