OS X Leopard comes with Python 2.5.1 and lacks the PIL package for image manipulation. Google App Engine's local SDK uses PIL to emulate its image manipulation features.

The instructions on Google's installation page for PIL are incorrect.

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This is a quick screencast to show you the data export solution I've created for Google App Engine that lets you backup your application's datastore and restore it either locally on your development machine or on the same Google App Engine application on the deployment environment or on a different Google App Engine application (which you can use as a staging environment).

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A new version of the Google App Engine Helper for Django has been released.

Release notes (Wed 6 August 2008) follow:

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I can't believe I've been using Python for several months now without really understanding the extended call syntax.

You know how in ActionScript you can do functionRef.apply(thisObj, argumentsArray) if you need to call a function with a dynamic list of arguments? I was looking for a way to do this in Python and googled for "apply". Lo and behold, I found that it was deprecated.

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One of the things that I love about Python is that it has all the documentation you ever need (all right, almost) in the code itself. Many moons ago, the very first framework I wrote in ActionScript (Flash 5) used the same technique by placing documentation on the activation objects of functions (and it would be cool to see that practice make a comeback in AS3.)

In Python, to find out what properties an object has, you just ask for a listing. The following, for example, shows you all properties and methods on the os module.

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