Spyced

Having been eyeball deep in App Engine for a while, evaluating it for a project at work and putting together a presentation for the utah open source conference, I've reluctantly concluded that I don't like it.  I want to like it, since it's a great poster child for Python.  And there are some bright spots, like the dirt-simple integration with google accounts.  But it's so very very primitive in so many ways.  Not just the missing features , or the "you can use any web framework you like, as long as it's django" attitude, but primarily a lot of the existing API is just so very primitive.   The DataStore in particular feels like a giant step backwards from using a traditional database with a sophisticated ORM .  Sure, it can scale if you use it right, but do you really know what that entails? Take the example of simple counting of objects .  There's a count() method, but in practice, it's so slow you can't use it.  Denormalize with a .count pr...

My App Engine 101 slides and code are up now. Bad news: my macbook pro did not work with the projector, period. Good news: I have seen it do this before (in a room with several mac experts -- it was not user error) and brought a backup laptop. Bad news: I forgot to include the django beta1 framework in my code upload, so I told people to just download it. But beta2 was out, and didn't work with the version of App Engine Helper I had. (It looks like r58 fixes this.) Manual poking about the django download site ensued until I got a new zip uploaded. Good news: the conference organizers liked it anyway and asked me to present a second time later in the day. Everything just worked the second time around.

App Engine is probably the biggest thing to happen to Python this year, so of course I volunteered to give a presentation on it at at the Utah Open Source Conference . (I'm scheduled for Friday, Aug 29, at 10:00 AM.) Last year's conference was a big success, so I'm looking forward to an even better experience this year. Here's the abstract I submitted, before they blew away my paragraph breaks: Google launched the App Engine service earlier this year to immense interest from the web development community. App Engine allows running applications on Google infrastructure, including BigTable, Google's non-relational, massively scalable database. App Engine is appealing both at the low end, where small shops don't want to have to deal with hardware procurement and systems administration, and at the high end, where the kind of "instant scaling" App Engine promises to deal with bursty traffic is the holy grail of infrastructure planning. This tutorial will ...

Now that I've been doing Python full time again for a while it's easy to forget how magical it can be. Last night I got an IM from a friend of a friend asking for (a) a recommendation for a Python book and (b) advice on writing a screen scraper. I pointed him to Dive Into Python and BeautifulSoup . Just now he IMed me again, "Hey, thanks for the tip. I ended up writing a screen scraper that I hadn't completed in 2 days in Groovy in about 20 minutes last night in Python with BeautifulSoup. So thanks, you got another python convert." I love my job.