Developing Upwards

@ironfroggy Calvin Spealman I can use AWS and work on technological engineering issues, or appengine and work on price-ological engineering issues. :-/ 10 Jan   via  TweetDeck   Maybe I should take myself seriously when I said this. In the past few months, I've barely done any feature or bug work on JournaApp, because it takes my limited time and energy just keeping myself under quota when I'm the only   user of the app . I can't keep that up and keep my sanity, and it is honestly an emotionally draining exercise. This is creating a toxin that affects everything I do, so I'm going to take it out of my life. I don't know if I'll port JournalApp or not. I like it, it has been fun and useful, but I'll probably take project notes in Evernote from here on forward, and on paper again. I miss paper.

Yeah, AppEngine has been around for a while. That doesn't make my general AppEngine article less timely. Hey, I don't just write about stuff because its hip. In a few months, I'll announce what Google Chrome means for the web landscape. Seriously. Although a lot of people believe Google App Engine is a very big thing and extremely important to the landscape of the web, I get the strong impression from outside the camp that its more of a toy, and I want to address that. As with my quick review of App Engine itself, its hard to make real calls when everything is still beta, but we're working with what we've got here. The people who see the real potential of App Engine feel it and the people who just think its neat Just Don't Get It . What is there to get that so many developers are missing and why would those of us that do think its important enough to be evangelical about, as I'm doing right now? Once again, making any claims or arguments in this discussion h...

If you haven't yet read the first part of this series, feel free to start from the beginning with Part 1 - An Overview of the Underview Every AppEngine developer is familiar with the module. In Part 1 I introduced what goes on under the hood of this API, to give everyone a better understanding of what they are taking advantage of. Now, in Part 2, I'm going to detail the actual API that is used to utilize the raw entities behind our Model instances. At this time I am unsure if anything in this API is suspect to change, but I doubt anything is subject to drastic flux and I'm fairly confident everything here is safe for actual use, as much as anything else in AppEngine. Module: google.appengine.api.datastore Our main focus here is the Entity class. Everything supports it, from the Get, Put, and Delete functions to the Query class. Their uses are obvious. As previous exposed, each entity is essential a property bag and will take any given properties to the datastore for storag...

There are a lot of wrong perceptions about the datastore in Google AppEngine. People both familiar and foreign with AppEngine don't really understand what the datastore is. There is a deeper system underneath the nice API we are given. Understanding the guts can help us understand the skin. We may also find there are times when we must shed the skin for new clothing. The biggest misconception about the datastore is the assumption that "kinds" are anything like "tables". You could use a set of entity kinds similar to the way you would use a set of tables, but they simply are different beasts, entirely. A table controls a strict requirement on the structure of its rows. Every entity, on the other hand, is free to hold any properties of allowed types. The published Model API is all an abstraction provided to give us a nice interface on top of an otherwise much looser foundation. Many people would be very surprised to learn that a given kind doesn't actually req...

Most of the buzz about the App Engine has died down, except among the developers actually using the platform. When the first public announcements were made, I was a part of the original group of developers first given access. This privilege was wasted. I did nothing with it. This has changed, which is a topic for a different post. I thought I'd take a moment to make my mark on the "What I think about Google App Engine" wall. A proper review is difficult, for a number of reasons. Namely, there is a very vague understanding of the difference between this "Preview Release" and what we'll have when it launches with all official status and commercial potential. We can only hope that any big changes won't interfere with our existing applications. If that does happen then existing players might turn to AppDrop for help, although any mass migration is highly doubtful. In any case, what everyone is talking about is what App Engine is now , not what it might turn...