App Engine
6 Oct 2008
Seems everyday I am discovering new issues with Google App Engine. Today, I implemented the Qik video channel for the conference, which pulls in the media RSS feed from Qik and displays the latest videos from the <head> event on Qik.
Unfortunately, Google App Engine's urlfetch api caches requests and doesn't give you a means not to cache the results or to set the cache duration (an issue that has been discussed several times on the forum too.)
On the off chance that you are running app-engine-patch and have started getting errors similar to…
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Users/aral/projects/headconference/trunk/shell/gateway.py", line 218, in evalCode
session.put()
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'put'
I've been working a lot with Google App Engine in the past few months. I still maintain, as I reiterated recently in my Boagworld interview with Paul, that it's a great idea and has great potential. And the Google App Engine team has been wonderful in working with me and helping me out. Unfortunately, there are a couple of fundamental issues that must be addressed, and addressed properly, before Google App Engine can be taken seriously as a web application platform.
(And no, Java support is most definitely not one of them.)
I lost quite a bit of time trying to get the PyAMF shell up and running on the <head> web site this week.
I started out by downloading the source for the shell app via a link on a post on the PyAMF blog. Unfortunately, the link was to the wrong version of the shell app (I've since informed the PyAMF team and Nick's fixed the link.)