My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.
I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.
This site is built on a fresh trunk checkout of Django, running on Python 2.5.1, served by Apache and mod_python. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive.
Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii
Copyright 2008
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media
People sure are excited about the Google App Engine. Especially people who have some other favorite language besides Python. A significant number of the issue tracker items are of the form "Please add support for $MY_LANGUAGE", where $MY_LANGUAGE might be VB.NET, C#, PHP, Java, Groovy, Ruby, Perl, etc. ad nauseam.
I'm not going to comment on the language-wars aspect.
But if you want your language supported (this goes for any issue in the tracker in fact), the thing to do is not to go to one of those issue pages and add a comment that consists of "+1". ("DUGG!!" is also not recommended.) That sends an email to everyone who has "starred" the issue. An email that consists of "+1". With your name on it.
The right thing to do is star the issue yourself. Notice that in the list of issues, there's no column that lets you sort by number of comments, but that the list defaults to sorting by the number of users who have starred it. That's a hint from Google.
A hint that some people have had a hard time taking...
OK, I lied about not commenting on the language wars.
It's pretty widely known that Google has four "official" languages internally: Python, Java, C++, and Javascript. I presume that a lot of the Python infrastructure in GAE is stuff that Google created for their own use. A corollary of this presumption is that the next GAE-supported language is going to come from that list. And it's not going to be C++.
It would be cool if the next language to be added was not a language per se, but broad support for the JVM and languages that live on it -- Clojure, Scala, Groovy, Jython, JRuby. That would shut a lot of people up make a lot of people happy, and be technically cool as well.
(But if the next one is Javascript, with Steve Yegge's Rails clone, that would be interesting too!)
Bump! That's funny.
I had forgotten about the Rails clone being Rhino-based; thanks for pointing that out. Makes Java/JVM being next seem even more likely.
Comments use Markdown syntax. Your comment will not appear until approved, which may take a few hours or more. Spammers will be torpedoed.
The iPhone keyboard doesn't suck
Python one-liner of the day
7 comments
How not to advocate via Google Code
2 comments
99 problems
3 comments
The original Lego Star Wars
2 comments
Toolbot.com source code available on request
Simon Griffee
Django Mercurial mirror tweaks
3 days ago
Jason Calleiro
From PHP to Python
4 days ago
Yuli
dpaste.com
7 days ago
bruce
Neat Python hack: infix operators
11 days ago
David Reynolds
The original Lego Star Wars
19 days ago
Jason Davies
Python one-liner of the day
21 days ago
Paddy3118
Let's play a game: BASIC vs. Ruby vs. Python vs. PHP
21 days ago
At least 22641 pieces of comment spam killed since January 12th. Thanks are mostly due to Akismet.
Incidentally, the Rails clone is actually written on Rhino, for the JVM.
What's really awesome about the appengine community: not only +1's, but people are replying to things on the mailing list with just "bump!"
The internet is just full of awesome!