Google Apps notes (incidentally, I think I need a "programming" icon of some sort)
Right. Google Apps. The overview page for the Google Apps service implies that it's good for hosting web apps written in Python (and now also ones written in Java). I have two projects that I would like to have hosted somewhere - one is the refbot (extracting CUTT downtimes from emails and putting onto the refwiki), the other is the Spinebot (incrementally-developed version of the PD downtime system, attempting improvements on a few aspects such as downtime submission).
The refbot needs to be finished, which I should do at home - it can read my mailbox at the moment, but the date it reads emails from is hardcoded, and all it does is print the headers. Remaining work includes calculating times for checking emails, cookie-tracking for the refwiki, HTTP authentication for the refwiki, formatting of email contents, email->player and subject/body->character matching, and populating of pages on refwiki. Most of it, basically. However, the refbot is currently run as a standalone script on my home machine, and doesn't require a hosted website to work (the most it requires is SQLite or even a text file to store the email->player and player->character mappings).
The Spinebot is more complicated, and is the one I want to get working on Google App Engine (and hosted thereon). Once it goes up, if I make a version public it'll have entirely fake tech tree names and times to avoid spoilers. (Partly because I'm not a ref and so don't know what most of the skills and so on are; partly because planning your seventeen-year route to becoming a master cakeomancer is far more fun than just modelling an existing game.)
It seems from the Google App Engine download page and the overview mentioned earlier that the way to use this is to download the App Engine SDK, develop on your own machine using Google App Engine's fake plastic webserver, then upload the app to Google. This is sort of a pity - I was hoping to be able to develop directly online, as it makes it easier to work on - but I can see why developing online even in a sandbox would be unlikely.
I've looked at and worked through the original Django tutorials on my home machine - I have a polls module, a charbot (CUTT character builder) module and a spinebot module sitting around. Shabda Raaj has written a version of the tutorial adapted to work with App Engine, but I suspect that more useful is Damon Kohler's tutorial on Google's own site about how to get Django to work with App Engine.
The main changes to a Django app to get it to work with App Engine appear to be stripping out the admin sections (Google Apps handles this) and changing the models sections to use Google's Python Datastore API rather than the Django models. I rather like the Django models, particularly the way they did many-to-many relations, but I've taken a brief look at Google's model/property system and it doesn't look too bad to convert.
The refbot needs to be finished, which I should do at home - it can read my mailbox at the moment, but the date it reads emails from is hardcoded, and all it does is print the headers. Remaining work includes calculating times for checking emails, cookie-tracking for the refwiki, HTTP authentication for the refwiki, formatting of email contents, email->player and subject/body->character matching, and populating of pages on refwiki. Most of it, basically. However, the refbot is currently run as a standalone script on my home machine, and doesn't require a hosted website to work (the most it requires is SQLite or even a text file to store the email->player and player->character mappings).
The Spinebot is more complicated, and is the one I want to get working on Google App Engine (and hosted thereon). Once it goes up, if I make a version public it'll have entirely fake tech tree names and times to avoid spoilers. (Partly because I'm not a ref and so don't know what most of the skills and so on are; partly because planning your seventeen-year route to becoming a master cakeomancer is far more fun than just modelling an existing game.)
It seems from the Google App Engine download page and the overview mentioned earlier that the way to use this is to download the App Engine SDK, develop on your own machine using Google App Engine's fake plastic webserver, then upload the app to Google. This is sort of a pity - I was hoping to be able to develop directly online, as it makes it easier to work on - but I can see why developing online even in a sandbox would be unlikely.
I've looked at and worked through the original Django tutorials on my home machine - I have a polls module, a charbot (CUTT character builder) module and a spinebot module sitting around. Shabda Raaj has written a version of the tutorial adapted to work with App Engine, but I suspect that more useful is Damon Kohler's tutorial on Google's own site about how to get Django to work with App Engine.
The main changes to a Django app to get it to work with App Engine appear to be stripping out the admin sections (Google Apps handles this) and changing the models sections to use Google's Python Datastore API rather than the Django models. I rather like the Django models, particularly the way they did many-to-many relations, but I've taken a brief look at Google's model/property system and it doesn't look too bad to convert.