Today at 1:00 am est (now), I was able to place my first app online (www.WhereIsFlix.com – Netflix Video Tracking). Python is growing on me. Compared to PHP or ASP you have a good bit of control over how the app functions. However, it’s not user friendly. The language is easy to pick up and being OO allows the code to start off clean.
The tools Google provides could use some work. While not hard to use the enviorement is somewhat klunky. The SDK installs a full blown Python server on your PC. Until I places a about 10,000 records into the Data Store the server ran quickly. After adding records the server took up over 350 Megs of memory and responded slowley and at times would lock up.
The bulk loader (bulkload_client.py) is another area where improvement could be needed. I was able to input zip codes with city, state, lat, and lon. However only about 10,000 of the 40,000 were loaded into the datastore due to googles own code maxing out the cpu quota. Loading this same data into the dev server running on my pc caused the shell to lock up several times.
Templates: I love the seperation of code between the Python and the templates, but found this to be a new challenge as this was yet another language to learn.
Tomorrow: I will be adding log in api’s to the code and trying to load the remaining 30,000 zip codes.
