Starting a Video Series To Introduce Programmers to AppEngine (Python)

[Brandon Wirtz]

I am going to start doing a Video series for first time programmers on writing in AppEngine  with Python.

 

I am going to recommend the Portable version of GAE with Python 2.5  this has some limitations but is easy to get started with. 

 

Does anyone have anything they specifically think people who have probably never even done a “Hello World” should know early on?

 

 

 

 

[Mahron]

Nice.
Thread safety and the cost of indexing is the most important thing I
believe.

[GAEfan]

For me, early on, it was getting my head around the datastore
structure (or, more aptly, the LACK of structure). I was migrating
over a large SQL table, and it was highly inefficient as one big model
in GAE. I ended up breaking it down into many different models
(entity groups) with ReferenceProperty, and had to think about how the
properties would be grouped to keep the datastore calls small and
fast.

Man, it makes such perfect sense now, but I had trouble understanding
at the beginning.

And of course, you need to start and end with optimizing code, caching
responses, etc. to keep the costs reasonable. And explain that their
code will be MUCH better after optimizing it for GAE. They will
"unlearn" some bad coding habits, and never look at app development
the same again.

[Ricardo Bánffy]

If it's going to be for people who are yet to write their first hello
world, a quick intro do HTTP and how browser-server things work would
be important.

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[N. Rosencrantz]

Important for me is to use the interpretor directly and the remote API so that I can use the gae without a script directly from the python interpretor. It requires a correct install to start python and do a from google.appengine.ap import ... and making python find the module without writing a script and doing it directly from the python command line.

I think the articles from Google needs updating especially the Users API and forms and frameworks. The Image API, the blobstore API, mapreduce and the Users API would be interesting topics as well as the newer projects NDB and webapp2. mapreduce seems very powerful and the easy of using cron jobs compared to regular Unix crons. I would also like to see more about WTForms instead of the djangoforms, Jinja2 instead of django rendering, webapp2 instead of builtin routing, webapp2 for easy user model and password hashing.
Regards,
Niklas