First Google App Engine application and impressions

Last night I spend a couple of hours creating my first "real" Google App Engine application, a pastebin called 0xC0DEBA5E (which is Codebase spelled in Hex, sorta).

All in all it was a pretty simple task. Google's Datastore is pretty simple but powerfull enough for simple applications like this (and probably more complex ones).

All in all it's a really simple framework. Local development works pretty well and deployment does what you expect. The only downside I've found so far is that the included (wrapped) django templates don't automatically escape inserted variables, which is a XSS security issue waiting to happen. Of course you can explicitly escape everything that's unsafe, but I'd rather have everything escaped and mark variables safe. This is also the default Django behaviour.

About the application itself. Pastebins tend to perform pretty poorly. I'm not sure why this is, but I'd be interested to see if one on Google's distributed architecture would perform/scale better. But for that to test I need more users of course :)

The main core of the application is about a hundred lines of code including import / WSGI boilerplate, and some 20 lines of relevant templating code. Not bad.

Some of the stuff I might add later:

• authentication using your google account
• anonymous submissions with some sort of captcha
• a way to generate shorter url's and store pastes longer
• a way to store and catagorize code snippets and patterns