Email address validation is a quixotic affair that's sure to end with you sporting a false sense of achievement and your users in tears. Many "better mousetrap" regular-expression-based validation system on the web today are overly strict and reject perfectly valid email addresses.

Beyond regular expressions and other string-based techniques, your options are to check the DNS server (but DNS lookups can fail on occasion) and vrfy the SMTP server (but many SMTP servers turn this off to stop email harvesters). Ultimately, you can actually send an email to the address and see if there are any bounces.

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When I was first starting out with Google App Engine (GAE), I wrote a short post detailing my thoughts on whether to use Django or Google's own webapp framework for GAE projects. In that post, I concluded that "there isn't a compelling reason to use Django at the moment with GAE".

Since then, I've re-evaluated my decision and, a few weeks ago, I ported the Singularity web app to Django from webapp.

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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'm playing around with Django (and considering whether to use it to build the back-end for Singularity). I love the regular expressions-based Front Controller that Django uses and the first thing I thought when I saw it was that it would be incredibly easy to use this to implement deep linking in Flex and Flash applications. I whipped up a proof-of-concept a few moments ago which I thought I'd share with you.

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My friend and fellow Brightoner Simon Willison of Django/OpenID fame has just released a lovely little mashup called wikinear that uses FireEagle and Wikipedia to show you Wikipedia articles that are relevant to your current location.

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