Hello World App

Today I built the basic "Hello World" app as described on the code.google.com site.  It was pretty straight forward, but a few little things that I had to work through.  I wanted to use the Google App Engine plugin for Eclipse, but it is geared towards a Java dev environment, so don't bother installing this if you are using Python.  The Pydev plugin I described in the last post is all you need.

First thing to do is look at this article that describes how to work through the tutorial using Pydev.  The Google site is either generic or a bit Windows centric.  Read the article to see how Pydev works with this tutorial and GAE.  The only problem I had, and it is just my inexperience with the Mac, was getting the Mac file browser window to recognize any path.  When the browser came up, you get the very user centered view of the filesystem, but you cannot browse to things like /usr/local/google_appengine which is what I needed to do to add the source trees to the project.  After  few searches I found the best key sequence ever, command-shift-g, it brings up a text box for any file path!

Next, start down the hello world app path.  You start out with "Hello World", but quickly move on to a few more complex things.  An excellent tutorial!  You setup users, forms, and even persistent datastorage (through Bigtable).  I learned a ton.

The only problem I continue to have is a Pydev problem I think.  When I startup the app server from within Eclipse using the Python Run setup in the article, I get this error message about 90% of the time.

Variable references empty selection: ${project_loc}

Not sure why, ${project_loc} is just the location as defined by Eclipse, might be a Pydev problem.  I'll look on stackoverflow later to see what is going on.  Stackoverflow is a great site for programming questions.