Django and the Google AppEngine

I’m sure that anyone into Django will either see or hear about this before they catch my blog post, but it’s too neat a story not to write about a comment on.

Tonight, Google released AppEngine – an elastic computing environment specifically set up with the idea of developing web applications in python. They’ve pushed up a copy of the transcript from their announcement if you’re interested…

It may come as no surprise that the back-end of AppEngine is/was heavily influenced by Django – and in fact the SDK that you can download comes with Django 0.96.1 embedded within it. That’s not to say Django is your only choice, but it definitely it mine.

To that end, there’s an excellent article up at their site on using Django with AppEngine – which basically boils down to: “Don’t use Django’s models, because we’ve got our own back-end datastore thingy, and it works similarly, but from different, than Django’s models and a database. I haven’t looked at the HQL datastore API they’ve got enabled, but I’m going to guess that some Django core developers likely will before too long to see what the potential overlap is for making it more directly usable with Django’s model system. (That guess is PURE speculation, I don’t have any insider knowledge there)

I wasn’t speedy enough on the request to get into the initial pool of folks who can use the beta – but I’ve tacked into the waitling list. It’s not like I really need another cool technology to go spend a lot of time on, but I’m really curious… especially with the idea that hosting some amount of your application might be available for free. Not quite sure how that is going to make sense long term – but I’ll take it while it’s available.

One thing for sure – this is certainly going to bring a boon of new attention to python web development, and likely Django as well.