I just released my new iPhone app, a labor of love called Feathers.

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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.)

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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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If you have a Yahoo Mail email address, chances are you are being kicked out of OSFlash mailing lists as we speak by the Mailman mailing list software that we use. If your favorite list or lists have gone silent suddenly, this is the reason. Until Yahoo! fixes this or tells me what I need to do to fix it, I would suggest that you use a non-Yahoo email address to subscribe to OSFlash mailing lists.
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