) so we listened to a couple of Google employees while they demoed their GAE-enabled apps (couldn't get their names, sorry). The clock hit the 7PM mark and it was time for Dick to take the stage, he is such a great speaker, made the talk rather enjoyable for someone neophyte in Python as myself. He walked through the Shoutout example but chose to code it as he spoke, not just a pre-fabricated demo (insert some Vi/Emacs vs IDEs here and there), got it running and moved on.He obviously touched the topic of language support in GAE (as you know it only runs Python at the moment) but did not disclose anything in particular, we will have to wait and see. But thanks to his presentation I now know that Google has to make a great effort to support a second language for GAE (no matter which one) as every single computer on every available data center that may run a GAE app must have the same environment. Now think on security issues, library licenses, 3rd party extensions and so on, multiply it by the number of hosting computers and you get a recipe for maintainability disaster. Oh right, and the GAE API itself
That is why in its current incarnation GAE endorses as little 3rd party Python libs as it can, if you want something on your app that GAE does not provide you must bringing to the table, and it better be 100% Python (no native mixups as they may bring security issues with them).
All attendees could sign up for a GAE invite so that they could happily hack (how do you 'hack' in Python?), I just received mine, good opportunity to try out PyDev (Dick showed us its step-by-step Python debugger, impressive).
