Thoughts on Google App Engine

As web developers we are faced with this problem: how do we scale up our code to handle high traffic? A lot of time and engineering goes into this problem -- time to simulate the traffic we expect and add servers to our cluster, cache heavy database access, etc, in anticipation of the load. Time is precious. This time could be spent optimizing the usefulness of our web product and creating interesting content. No one really congratulates you when a website works, they expect it to work. When Google App Engine was released their pitch was...

Most deployment systems depend on PyPI, the Python Package Index, for fetching and installing dependencies. Although performance and reliability has greatly improved, there are still days when you may find PyPI down and thus are unable to deploy through the normal fashion. Fi...

Y'aharrr me seabound mateys! Thar be'a fine gully of'a wind shakin' ye jigger today as m'announce a new release of Fixture, a python module fer loadin' and referencing test data. O'er yonder ye find a cap'n's Changelog fer ye royal subjects. Riches abound! Booty abaft! ...

Today was Chicago's Google App Engine Hack-A-Thon and I managed to get some good work done. Well, I had planned to make packages more ephemeral on the PyPi mirror since it quickly hit the 500MB limit as is. But instead I decided to add Datastore support to the fixture m...

... learn Python? No. They try compiling Ruby to Python bytecode, naturally. One has to admire their pride, I guess. The funny part is this might actually work. As the article points out, Ruby's opcode structure was inspired by Python's (I had no idea it was so similar, ...

The Google App Engine SDK sets up a fairly restrictive Python environment on your local machine to simulate their runtime restrictions. Roughly this consists of no access to sockets and thus barely working httplib, urllib, etc (replaced by urlfetch.fetch()), inability to...

Like many of you, I've had my jaw on the floor since the release of Google App Engine. Although there are skeptics out there, a careful read of their terms will show you that it's for real — Google has released GOOGLE to the world and it's not for scary marketing purpos...