I've had "play with Google App Engine" on my to-do list for a long time. It always seemed like the most sensible of the cloud programming systems. Amazon want to rent you whole PC instances by the minute (and I don't want to have to actually configure or manage an OS), Microsoft want to rent you a processor on an ongoing basis (and I just want to play with this stuff, I don't see it being used for more than seconds-minutes/day), but Google only want to charge you for the time your application is actually doing any work (and any bandwidth is uses) and don't make you faff around with anything apart from the actual code you want to run.
As I already know C#, and have played around with Java a bit, I figured that using Java on App Engine was the way forward. So I followed the instructions to start getting things set up, and then started looking at the tutorial. Which seemed ridiculously complex for doing the basics. Loading data looked like the
kind of thing that would drive a person crazy. So I had a quick look at
the Python equivalent and was able to wrap my brain around it with very little difficulty. Which makes me wonder why the Java version is so complicated.
But anyway, despite the itchy feeling that working without an IDE gives me, I've worked my way through the tutorial, puzzled over some basic syntax, and I think I've got the hang of the basics. It seems simple enough, I quite like the use of whitespace, and I'm now going to play around with some code of my own.
Once, that is, I've gone looking for a decent IDE that will, at the very least, point out when I've mispelled something, and preferably allow me to step through my code!
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princealbert
