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 [...]

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. [...]

I've had a hard time trying to get Internet Explorer on Windows (under Parallels) to connect to the Google App Engine local development server running on OS X. The interesting thing was that IE would connect to the built-in web server on the Mac without problem (using the Shared Network setting, I could also connect to [...]

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 [...]