I'm seeing a lot of misinformation out there that Google App Engine has SSL support. It doesn't. If you read Google's announcement from last month carefully, you will see that it is titled "Announcing HTTPS support for appspot.com", not "for Google App Engine" . "What's the difference?", you may be wondering. It's quite big. What google supports is [...]

Google today released Google App Engine SDK 1.1.6 (announcement, download) which, among other things, brings with it datastore keys that you can sort and filter on. What this means is that you can now do batch operations on data. So it's time for me to go back to my Google App Engine backup solution, which broke [...]

Update: The quotas have been reset, the site is back up, and engineers at Google are monitoring them and working closely with me until we can figure out what the issue is and fix it. (more...)

Backing up and restoring the datastore in your local SDK can be very useful for several use cases. Personally, I find that I alternate between running the local SDK with a restore of data from the deployment environment and with an empty or test datastore. The local SDK slows down painfully when you populate it with [...]

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. To install PIL, follow these instructions by Matt Kangas instead. (Thanks, Matt!) The only thing I'd add [...]