Python Is Coming

Yesterday evening (7:30 til 10:00) I attended the Atlanta Python user's group meeting held at Georgia Tech's Food Processing Center. The main presentation was about Google's new App engine...a complete application development and hosting environment utilizing Google's infrastructure. Right now the only development language supported is Python and App engine is in beta limited to around 10,000 developers. Last week I received my app engine developers account from Google and so was excited to see a presentation on it at the python meeting. The most important insight I gained from the presentation is that the apps database engine supports flat tables only...no joins between tables (arrrrrgh). Although tables can be linked and there is good referential integrity between tables. So the take away is think lists not tables…denormalize your data structure…and put everything you need to deliver a record to the web into a single record. Well this is just the beta...wonder what Google's plans are moving forward? Hopefully we'll get a better db at some point. Wish I was attending Google's I/O conference in two weeks in San Fran...where all questions regarding the app engine will probably be answered. For more information on the Google App Engine here's a presentation on youtube on how to create and deploy an application using the app engine. And it's very interesting that Python is now number seven on the Tiobe programming index, one position ahead of C# and two positions up from Ruby. Python seems to be on the rise as the language of choice in the web 2.0 hacker community.