[Chicago] Working on Google App Engine Saturday?

[Kumar McMillan]

Hey all (yes, big cross post here, but I know you can handle it)

Last night at the ChiPy meeting (http://chipy.org/) we saw a
well-prepared presentation on the state of web2py
(http://mdp.cti.depaul.edu/) followed by a discussion on Google App
Engine -- what it's good for, what it means to the code world, how to
get things working, etc.  Ian Bicking remarked that he hasn't had any
"fun" with App Engine yet because he's been working hard to get things
working so that other people (and he to, eventually) can have fun; see
http://blog.ianbicking.org/ .  Be sure to tell him THANK YOU ;)  The
interesting part for me is trying to understand the Datastore API
(http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/datastore/), that is, shifting
my brain into storing data in a massively distributed "cloud."  The
concepts in using Google's datastore are similar to those of using
CouchDB (http://incubator.apache.org/couchdb/).  The one that hurts
the most is you can't do joins like in SQL!

Now back to the subject of this email ... some people got together
last Saturday to work on App Engine projects and this Saturday there
are plans to do that again via the BRAND NEW Saturday House Chicago
group:
http://groups.google.com/group/chicago-saturday-house

come join us...

April 19th @ 11:00am
Noble Tree cafe
http://nobletree.tumblr.com/
2444 N Clark Street

If you are thinking to yourself, what is a Saturday House?  It's this:
http://www.saturdayhouse.org/


Anyone is welcome and it's just a time to work so you don't have to
work on App Engine.  If anyone is *looking* for an App Engine project,
I've started a site to mirror PyPi, the Python Package Index, and
anyone who wants to help out is more than welcome.

The site: http://pypi.appspot.com/
The project: http://code.google.com/p/pypione/

If nothing more, you can browse the code (it's not pretty) to get an
idea for how to make a basic App Engine site and do datastore stuff.
I also got an automated test suite running in-process for unit tests.
This was surprisingly easy.  The setup code for that is in:
http://code.google.com/p/pypione/source/browse/trunk/test/__init__.py
.  To run it you need nose and WebTest installed and the Google SDK.


-Kumar