Its been three days since the Google App-Engine Announcement and the release of the SDK (available Here). So far the installation of the environment is easy as pie and the tutorials and documentation of the APIs and some basic python commands is great. The Getting Started documents show some of the potential that app-engine has (Available Here)

I thought it would be a good test of my skills and a great way to learn python to try and make a calculator site. I started with a simple Area calculation (Length X Width), starting from the guest book application in the documentation. I got everything to work until I tried to actually do the calculation. I know I’m not a programming genius, but I have all of the basic concepts down yet I still couldn’t get a simple multiplication problem to work. It seems that all form input is in unicode and I have no idea how to work with that.

Using the function “self.request.get(”)” I was able to gather the input from the fields. I then used the “int()” function to convert the string input to an integer and I got an error that said something like “Coercing the Unicode : Integer found”

Though I only worked with the code for about three hours, It seems that I still have a lot to learn about python. If anyone has any great books or tutorials for python let me know in the comments.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 12:50 pm and is tagged with Google, Programming, Python, Web Design. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.