Monday, 16th February 2009
Google App Engine 1.1.9 boosts capacity and compatibility. Niall summarises the recent changes to App Engine. urllib and urllib2 support plus massively increased upload limits and request duration quotas will make it a whole lot easier to deploy serious projects on the platform.
Web Hooks and the Programmable World of Tomorrow. Tour de force presentation on Web Hooks by Jeff Lindsay. Tons of really good ideas—provided your application isn’t Flickr sized, there’s a good chance you could implement web hooks pretty cheaply and unleash a huge flurry of creativity from your users. GitHub makes a great case study here.
Write to a Google Spreadsheet from a Python script. I didn’t know Google Spreadsheets could directly serve dynamic images that automatically update when the underlying data changes.
“Recover my account” link on the login page. For the record, collecting and verifying e-mail addresses is a VERY good idea, even (especially?) if you accept OpenID. A verified e-mail address is still absolutely the best way to deal with lost passwords or “my OpenID isn’t working”.
Dulwich. A pure Python implementation of the Git file format and protocols. Reinforces my impression that a key to Git’s success is stable, well designed and documented on-disk formats.