Python
25 Dec 2008Update: Beta 2 Released! See the Gaebar Beta 2 announcement.
The cool thing about user submitted content is that you can't always predict what you're going to get. Our speakers at the Singularity Web Conference, for example, submit and update their own bios and session descriptions on the site. Yesterday, I noticed that Dr. Woohoo had put up an image of one of his awesome generative artworks in his session description.
Of course, since I hadn't considered images in session descriptions, this had the side-effect of breaking the layout of the sessions page.
This is a quick screencast to show you the data export solution I've created for Google App Engine that lets you backup your application's datastore and restore it either locally on your development machine or on the same Google App Engine application on the deployment environment or on a different Google App Engine application (which you can use as a staging environment).
One of the things that I love about Python is that it has all the documentation you ever need (all right, almost) in the code itself. Many moons ago, the very first framework I wrote in ActionScript (Flash 5) used the same technique by placing documentation on the activation objects of functions (and it would be cool to see that practice make a comeback in AS3.)
In Python, to find out what properties an object has, you just ask for a listing. The following, for example, shows you all properties and methods on the os module.
Developer emptor: I just lost a couple of hours to this: make sure you disable the Google App Engine doctest import in your apps when you're done testing a module lest you encounter _weird_ errors. I started having the login URL returned by users.create_login_url() being returned incorrectly when I forgot to remove the doctest import. It started forwarding to https://www.google.com/accounts/Login?continue=. Check out my forum post on it here.
I love Python's doctests. Basically, you test out your functions in the interactive shell and copy the results into the comments for a function. That's it! So simple.