/ APP-ENGINE, PYTHON

First Impressions of Google App Engine

So I thought I would try to see what Google App Engine is all about. My main goal is to learn python a little better and also try to get a better understanding of how to build applications that can

  • Handle a lot of load
  • Be distributed
  • Have Standard Data access

Installing

I’m a .Net developer on a Windows machine and really don’t have a lot of Linux/Python experience. I know I’m not alone so I am going to track my experience using GAE to build my car maintenance application know as Motozio.

I’m following the Google Getting started guide which is the following

Coding

Installation is a breeze. The two python files for the hello world program are pretty straight forward too.

Trouble hit when I tried to test my application. I really didn’t know how to call the script but I figured it out.

My application folder structure looks like this c:\dev\helloworld\ c:\dev\helloworld\helloworld.py c:\dev\helloworld\app.yaml

Running

I had to open a command prompt and type: C:\dev>dev_appserver.py helloworld Notice that the path to google_appengine, where the dev_appserver.py script resides, is already in the system path. The script dev_appserver wants the path to the application. Which is the helloworld directory.

Once I got that figure out. Bam! My helloworld was up and running at http://localhost:8080

I’m always impressed with out of the box examples of hello world. I really liked the ruby on rails example. And I am just as impressed with App Engine so far. Of course it doesn’t take much to impress me.