Update: "Google App Engine: To Django or to webapp?" Revisited.

Google App Engine (GAE) supports both its own framework, called webapp, and Django.

So, which one do you use?
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I ran into a sneaky little bug when working locally with the Google App Engine Development Web Server and using the Mail API: sending email begins to fail if you change the source code of the class or module that contains the Mail API calls.

The actual error you get is: SystemErrorParent module 'email' not loaded.
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The Google App Engine Mail API lets you easily send email from your applications. However, I found it difficult to test it locally when using the Development Web Server.

The documentation states that you can either use an existing SMTP provider or sendmail with the local server but the former solution didn't work for me with GMail or the SMTP server at my web host. And, from a quick Google search for sendmail, I got the impression that I should stay away from it.

In the end, I opted to use a simple Python-based SMTP server by Les Smithson to debug my mail calls locally.

It's very simple to use:
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Update: This post is barely a week old and already outdates. See my updated post and The GAE SWF Project to get started quickly buildingFlash and Flex applications on Google App Engine.
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Google App Engine is a massively-scalable all-in-one application, database, and storage hosting solution released this week by Google. And it has me more excited than I can remember in a long while.

Here's how it works:
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