In my first experiment with Google's AppEngine, I dove straight in and started using CherryPy for development. This worked pretty well at first, but I eventually hit some issues due to lack of threading within AppEngine.

At that point, I decided to step back a bit and take a fresh look with a pure-WSGI approach. I had never used WSGI directly, so this was an interesting experiment. I definitely like the simplicity of pure-WSGI, but the question will be how much custom code I have to write versus using a prebuilt framework. (Don't get me wrong, I expect to return to CherryPy later, but I want to experiment at the lower level for now.)

You can follow the work in progress at boodebr.appspot.com

Google's App Engine is a new application platform from Google that allows you to run custom Python code on Google's infrastructure. From their website: Several websites (including Google) make the claim that App Engine is compatible with any WSGI framework, even mentioning CherryPy by name. Unfortunately, they don't give any examples using CherryPy, and it turns out that it doesn't quite work "out of the box". Fortunately it wasn't too tricky to get it working, so I documented the steps here.

Click through to read more ...

I've decided to play with Google Code a bit, to host some miscellaneous code from boodebr.org.

Up to this point in my programming life, the only version control systems I've used have been darcs and mercurial, which are both distributed systems. The concept of having to use svn to access Google Code really made me cringe.

Fortunately, there is nice tool called svk which makes a standard svn server look very much like a distributed system. I wrote a little walk-through to demonstrate the basics of using svk with Google Code.

Read it here: Google Code: Getting started with svk

This is a quick walk-through of working with a Google Code project, using svk instead of svn on the client-side.

Why svk?

• svn requires you to have a network connection to Google Code in order to commit any changes.
• svk allows you work fully disconnected, only reconnecting to push back your changesets, or to pull updates from others.
• svk features a much nicer merge algorithm that eliminates the need to manually track revisions that have been merged (as svn requires you to do).
• On a personal note, the only version control systems I've used up to this point have been darcs and mercurial, which are both distributed systems. The "svk" way of working seems much more natural to me than svn does.
  
  

Getting started

1. The first thing I did was to create a new project. I named the project boodebr.
2. Once this was done, my new project was immediately available at http://boodebr.googlecode.com
   
   

Lets look at how to do "guest" (read-only) access as well as author/contributor (read-write) access below.

Guests access (read-only) via svk

First, create a mirror of the svn repository:

Lets create a working copy:

You'll want to grab the latest updates periodically:

To completely wipe out our mirror and working copy:

Author/contributor access (read-write) via svk

Make sure you know your googlecode login and password (you can find them here).

The first step is to create a mirror of the svn repository: This will prompt you for a few things:

1. When it shows you the certificate information, select (p)ermanently so it won't ask you every time.
   At this point I received the following error:

   RA layer request failed: PROPFIND request failed on '/svn/trunk': PROPFIND of '/svn/trunk': Could not read status line: Secure connection truncated (https://boodebr.googlecode.com)

   Simply re-running the command fixed it.
2. It will then say Password for 'YourLogin'. If 'YourLogin' is not the same as your google-code login, simply press ENTER and it will let you enter your correct username and password.
   
   

Its probably a good idea to go ahead and sync first:

To use svk for "disconnected" operation, you need to create a local copy of the repository:

Now checkout your working copy from //local/boodebr, not //mirror/boodebr:

Go about your work, editing files, commiting changes (svk ci), etc.

To pull updates from google-code, merging with your working copy (if needed):

When you are ready to push back to google-code: This has just been a quick introduction to Google-Code-via-svk. If you have any suggestions or corrections, please let me know below!