Question

I’m about to start an App Engine project for the first time. Most likely with Python. I was wondering if anybody could give me a leg up by detailing their workflow when developing for it. What tools do you use to go from start to deployed? Did you do any app engine specific configurations to those tools?

Answer 1

How big of an application are you planning? Using the python runtime, it’s pretty easy to get even a medium-to-large sized app developed with nothing more than a text editor (I use TextMate or vi).

Python is an incredibly terse language (or can be), and you can have multiple related handlers in one file, so you don’t need anything to handle more than a dozen files across a bunch of directories, like you might with Java for example.

To test your app locally you just need dev_appserver.py and to upload your app you just need appcfg.py. Easy peasy.

Even if you’re planning on writing a huge complex app, I would just start small with a simple text editor and find more robust tools when you find that you need them (and know specifically what you need from them).