Comments on: “Google App Engine: To Django or to webapp?” Revisted

By: jorge

jorge — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 04:50:58 +0000

Well you got a point with trunk, there is no real reason to use 0.96 for new projects.

The helper is indeed a very nice tool, although it still makes you learn django (if you haven’t)

As for Guido, we all know he has a think for django.

One point against django that you forgot is that it’s made as a monolithic component, so ones you start using parts of it things get nasty, for example take a look at how much trouble the appengine people had to go thru to be able to use django-templates in webapp. Just read the module docstring of google_appengine/google/appengine/ext/webapp/template.py

That said I totally agree on the wsgi comment from Noah. In fact I can tell you that I’m using pylons on appengine, but the core is webapp and I don’t have pylons installed on that virtualenv

By: Aral

Aral — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:26:14 +0000

Hi Noah,

I’d love to hear more about the book you’re writing. If you need a tech reviewer, etc., give me a ping — I’m interested!

It is interesting the Guido is using Django himself for Rietveld.

By: Noah Gift

Noah Gift — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 01:18:05 +0000

Hi,

I am currently in the middle of writing a book on Google App Engine, was at the Google I/O question, asked Guido in the Fireside chat about support for 3rd party components such as Django, and interpreted things in a different way.

I think the webapp framework IS the best approach at this moment. The real beautify of Python web development is the WSGI standard. There are many wonderful things happening with WSGI and the webapp framework currently supports WSGI fully unlike the current trunk version of Django. If you want to use Django components then it might make more sense to use the current django templates and URL dispatch that come with the webapp framework. In reality, webapp is a forked version of Django with support for WSGI, due to the brilliant work of Ian Bicking: http://ianbicking.com.

By: Charlie

Charlie — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 03:15:09 +0000

Heh, I was next in line at the mike when Guido stopped taking questions! Ah well. I have some notes posted from App Engine-related sessions, although very raw notes, and not that particular session. Trying to get a handle on how to get all this set up correctly…

By: Aral

Aral — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:18:24 +0000

Hi Tom,

Thanks so much for reporting in — happy to know I made the right decision! And thanks also for the session notes.

By: Tom Offermann

Tom Offermann — Fri, 30 May 2008 21:47:52 +0000

You made the right decision. I was at Google IO this week where Guido gave an hour long presentation about how to set up and utilize Django 0.97 on Google App Engine. In the Q&A that followed, I asked him if there was any reason to use the built-in webapp framework instead of Django, and he said that webapp was much simpler and easier to get started with, but that Django was much more powerful. In a later “Fireside Chat”, he added that they will not be adding any more features to or actively developing the webapp framework.

Given that, I think it’s clear that the vast majority of App Engine development will happen with Django.

I wrote up my notes from the App Engine sessions at Google IO here: http://offermann.us/2008/05/29/day-one-at-google-io/