Simon Willison’s Weblog

Running Django on Google App Engine. Django 0.96 is included, but you need to disable the ORM related parts and use the Google App Engine Bigtable interface instead.

Posted 8th April 2008 at 1:15 pm

Tagged django, google, googleappengine, python

4 comments

Considering google have created a framework to work with, why would you want to use django on appengine?

Michael Air - 13th May 2008 03:23 - #
A couple of reasons spring to mind:

1. You have a Django application that doesn't have a huge dependency on the ORM, and you want to port it. I've ported Wikinear.com to AppEngine for example (though I can't go live with it as the 5 second timeout on HTTP requests is a bit to steep for that application).

2. You prefer Django's URL handling and request/response model to the one provided by Google's webapp framework. I'm playing with a webapp powered site at the moment and it feels a little clunky to me; compare the following:
```
# webapp
class HomePage(webapp.RequestHandler):
    def get(self):
        self.response.headers['Content-Type'] = 'application/javascript'
        self.response.out.write("...")

# Django
def homepage(request):
    return HttpResponse("...", content_type='application/javascript')
```
Simon Willison - 13th May 2008 06:49 - #
Thanks Simon. Came to a similar conclusion myself. Didn't know if I had missed something obvious on the django side.

I don't think being verbose is a bad thing though. At least you understand what the code is doing.

Michael Air - 14th May 2008 15:48 - #
Maybe you should check out this project: http://code.google.com/p/appengine-admin/

Arnolds - 27th November 2008 21:10 - #