Appengine + Django 1.1

So i got past my previous post with a different cell phone number. Now I know getting an appengine account is a more difficult than most online accounts. It makes sense too given free website hosting is at stake.

Anyhow, after a short time i was able to get django 1.1 up and running on appengine. For a little clarity, this provides all the glory of django templates, urls.py, middleware, forms, settings. But because of the big table db implementation of appengine, the admin tool, auth, session, and anything else built-in and dependent on django models will not work.

I found some other blogs that were close, but none of the step by steps worked for me. I followed instructions found at goole python libraries - django.

Since i learn best from code, I checked a basic project into github that i'll continue to update on git as i make updates.

Browse the code on git.

Appengine Disappoints

So i got excited a couple weeks ago about appengine and how easy it could make hosting a simple domain. And i am still excited....but there are some major usability issues with the way they allow you to sign up for appengine accounts.

First thing they require is that you verify via SMS. Okay no problem. right. Unless you're me, then apparently they can't send a message to my sprint phone. Then the form confuses me by making it look like i submitted a different carrier (SouthernLink Wireless) making me try multiple times.

Then i do some web searches to find that not only are other people struggling with the same issue, but their security only allows one account to one phone. Therefore if you play around with appengine using your gmail account, you're screwed if you buy a domain name, sign up for google apps, and then want to host a site with appengine.

This is an embarrassment to google. A company who i was a real fanboy of until recently( see eric schmidt on privacy to learn when i dropped my fanboy stance).