Lone Canoe Productions

App Engine Impressions

April 11th, 2008 by Dustin Chilson

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.

Tagged with Google, Programming, Python, Web Design | No Comments »

Google App Engine

April 8th, 2008 by Dustin Chilson

I know this has been all over the world and back, but I still find it interesting. Google has released a new service or a Platform for web developers called App Engine. It allows for web developers to focus in on the applications and features of their code instead of worrying about the server side implications of scaling and even user management.

“Google App Engine gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data. The development environment includes the following features:

Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies

Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)

Automatic scaling and load balancing

Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email

Fully featured local development environment

Google App Engine packages these building blocks and takes care of the infrastructure stack, leaving you more time to focus on writing code and improving your application.”

One of the “bad” things that the servers only support Python. Though a little inconvient it still gives the oportunity to learn a new language. Looks like I will be learning Python.