google app engine

Project PaaS : Day 2 on Google App Engine

It looks like I was able to accomplish writing the application that I wanted to on the App Engine in 2 days!!  at least in it’s basic form.  After some help from Google, I updated the application I created yesterday (http://samurai-apps.appspot.com/) to display the User Agent string being sent by the client.

The code has been updated to github at https://github.com/kudithipudi/google-app-engine/

Lessons from day 2?

  • Python doesn’t like tabs :). Always use spaces to ident. I was using Notepad++ as the editor and it automatically puts tabs when you hit enter. Why? Looks like that is the best practice according to this style guide (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/)
  • The “Logs” console in the SDK toolkit should be your best friend. It let’s you know if there is any error in your code and what line it believes the error is at.

Next, I will try to pretty it up a bit.

Isn’t it amazing that I was able to create a simple app in a matter of 2 days and host it on an “infinitely” scalable  platform without even taking our my credit card.

May 3, 2012 by HOWTO Programming Technology Uncategorized 0

Project PaaS : Day 1 on Google App Engine

Following up on my public resolution for his month..I started playing with Google App engine. I think a lot has been written about what it is and how it works, but in a nutshell, think of it as an environment to deploy your applications and not have to worry about underlying system capacity. It provides support for Java, Python and more recently Google’s own Go programming languages.

I chose Python, since I have been meaning to dabble in it for a while now. So without further adieu, here is a link to my first application on Google App Engine

http://samurai-apps.appspot.com/

And obviously it has to be hello world :).

How did I get here?

  1. As any good programmer would do, I first tried to find a good place to store my source code. I chose Github, since it seems to be the goto place for hackers (in the good sense 🙂 ) in recent times. I opened a free account on it and created a repository called google-app-engine at https://github.com/kudithipudi/google-app-engine/ .
  2. Following instructions listed here https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/gettingstartedpython27/ and created the helloworld script.
  3. Enabled App Engine on my account by validating myself. Had to use my mobile phone to do the validation.
  4. Created an app called samurai-apps in the Google App Engine control panel
  5. Deployed the helloworld script to the Google Apple engine using the deploy function in the SDK tool. (note: make sure that the name of the app you create in the SDK is the same as the one you created in the app engine control panel. Or you will get an error stating “This application does not exist (app_id=u’xxx’).” where  xxx is the name of the app in the SDK tool)

Pretty simple eh.. 🙂

Now the challenge is to program something more useful than print hellworld :).

 

May 2, 2012 by Programming Technology Uncategorized 0