Today I experimented with the creation of an application in Python to run on the new Google App Engine (GAE) infrastructure. Things couldn’t have been easier. I whipped up a .yaml file, created a couple of Python classes, a simple CSS stylesheet and HTML form (to give the application a face) then ran a single command line command (“appcfg.py update myapp”) and a few seconds later, there it was! An online, robust, scalable web application operating on the Google infrastructure. I use Eclipse IDE because of its extensibility and because there exists a plugin to develop GAE applications in either Java or Python. I am a fan of python because of its efficient data types like lists and dictionaries. I was however curious as to why I need to locate all resources in a sub-folder called “src” under the application – why couldn’t the source files be located in the root directory of my local file system folder for the application? Anyway, something to test out another time. I am going to dig a little deeper into the data structures available to a GAE application tomorrow – I’ll let you know how it goes