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Wednesday, 17th September 2008, No Comments »

Pub argument inspires google application

I had been considering since the launch of Google’s appengine to look into it and give it a go, but couldn’t really think of a situation where it would be suitable.

While out one evening, inspired in great part by the novel High Fidelity, Terry, Greer, a few others (that shall remain nameless) and myself argued about our top 5 albums of all time. The name calling and the poking of fun at our respective choices stuck in my mind, and thus, the concept for My5ives was born.

Appengine is different, no really

I had heard stories, whispers and bold claims that appengine was different. I put this down to people being new to Django, Python and Google’s Big Table.

I had some experience with Django and Python before, so I wasn’t particularly worried about that side of things. What worried me was Google’s Big Table and that’s where I tripped up.

It took me a while to get out of thinking in a ‘traditional’ relational database way. Thankfully, Lenz from Ideegeo, who comes up to AltSpace now and again, was a great shoulder to cry on when I thought I was getting it all backwards or complaining that ratings should be calculated like that.

Was it a good experience?

I found Google’s appengine docs a little confusing, its a little scattered around and I found the examples weren’t clear in the ‘proper’ documentation. I ended up relying on the Google appengine articles the further I got into it. I also stupidly didn’t realize for the first day by default I was using Django’s templating system.

Now, here’s the amazing thing. It took me about 2 days of work to get from a basic idea to launched application and the response (including the Fleetwood Mac vibes) was amazing and humbling, for example I never expected more than 5 people to actually take part, so I never added pagination.

Thank you to all of you that added your top five.