2008 July

Google App Engine is Moderately Full of Win

Google App Engine has been out for a while and still is in a testing phase. It’s an app engine (duh) that contains libraries for web development and allows you to host your applications on Google’s servers. In the future, more languages will be available, but currently, the only runtime available is Python.

It has it’s ups and downs. You can use Google’s Google Accounts system as your authentication system, which, to me, is fucking amazing. I hate making user systems and like how things can be linked like that; I only need one account for Google and all of their servers and applications, and only have one password I need to remember and one set of information I need to keep up to date.

A huge plus? Most, if not all, of the handling and configuration is done in a file called app.yml. And you know how I feel about YAML. Here’s an example of my top-secret (more on that later) application’s app.yml file.

application: active-camo
version: 1
runtime: python
api_version: 1
handlers:
- url: /
  script: index.py
#- url: /get_data
#  script: resources/get_data.py
#- url: /data
#  script: data.py

What does this mean? It supplies the application’s identifier, the version (you can have multiple versions and roll back to an older one should you need,) the runtime (right now, only Python,) and the API version (right now, only 1.)

Below are the handlers for this application. See the comments? You can do that, it’s YAML! This means that / (index with no filename) will be handled by index.py. Isn’t that great?

There are also some downsides, though. Python naturally isn’t very good at handling files, which means that, in this case, I need to keep just about every file separate. I can’t use include 'header.php'; as I normally would.

And about my top-secret project? If I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret. But it’s probably not that interesting, don’t worry about it.

People STILL Use Tables?

As I’m sure you know, I strongly oppose the use of tables for website design. I stopped using tables ages ago and assumed the rest of the web had, too. But I was dead wrong. I was on a message board and spotted a thread about a person looking for web design help. Somebody suggested he not use tables, and I agreed.

But we’re in the minority. Two or three people immediately jumped on us and told us about how wrong we were, one went so far as to say I’m just a stereotype of a wannabe developer. It’s a shame that it’s actually 2008 now and we still have people who’ve no idea what web semantics are.

Tables are made for tabular data. As in, to display data that belongs in a table. W3C has said this numerous times. But why do people still make websites using tables?

• It’s easier. Tables aren’t as difficult to use as semantics web elements.
• Big names use tables. Google, MySpace and other popular websites all sport table-based designs.

As a public message to all table-users: