In Re:

App Engine is a pretty dramatic thought departure for lots of programmers who are used to writing an app that runs on a single server and access a single database.  Case in point, there has been a recurring topic of auto-increment fields on the  App Engine list — people trying to implement their own version of it since it is not a native datastore type.

Using an auto-increment field is not the way to go.  It is viable when you only have 1 database but the datastore for your app is going to/can be replicated out to other machines.  This would mean that their exists times, when datastore’ != datastore” — over time datastore’ would be sync’d with datastore” so that datastore’ == datastore”   — this would lead one to believe that there will be times when the idea of an auto-increment field will not be synchronizable or that the result of the synchronization would be less than satisfactory.  My belief that auto-increment fields are the wrong idea in this environment is strengthened by the fact that they are not offered as an intrinsic datatype.

The way to go, in my opinion, is to use UUIDs. (see links below)
  http://docs.python.org/lib/module-uuid.html
  http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc4122.html

Other Thoughts on the topic:

• data access is very expensive, using a UUID should be faster
• UUID1 or UUID4 would be the types to consider
• UUID1 is preferable as it would introduce some machine significance which should make the chances for a collision to be even more remote than for a UUID4 (random)

Noah Gift over on O’Reilly OnLamp Blog has an article on building a greedy coin changer. That is, given a value, say 71 cents, calculate the fewest coins needed to make the amount. He had listed a number of solutions, but I felt I could do it a bit more pythonic.

#!/usr/bin/env python
"""implement a greedy coin changer, returning the
fewest coins to make the change requested."""
#coin_list can be expanded to include silver dollars
# and 50 cent pieces by just expanding the coin list
# to [100,50,25,10,5,1] the reulting answer
#structure will modify itself to reflect 

coin_list = [25,10,5,1]
change_requested = .71
remaining = change_requested * 100
change_returned = []    #result structure

for coin in coin_list:
    num_coins,remaining =  divmod(remaining,coin)
    change_returned.append(int(num_coins))

print change_returned
print remaining

The benefits of this version, are no conditional logic is needed, the coin structure can be modified and the answer will modify itself accordingly.

Now this is truly an interesting development. Google’s just announced App Engine is sure to super-charge the Python community and convert a number of disillusioned developers of other languages in to Pythonistas. There have been lots of interesting comments floating in the blogosphere about what this could mean.

I think it is a great opportunity on a smaller scale than anyone might imagine. Sure, this could serve as the platform for the next YouTube type social-2.x site, but what I think this really means, is that Google is rounding out the Google Apps for Domains by giving the ability to create something more than a brochure-ware style site offered by their current Sites for Google Apps.

Many are looking for Google to use this as an opportunity to expand advertising revenue, and that is certainly possible for widely popular webX.x sites but what they really needed is another tool/knife to hold to the competition’s throats. Looking at the tea leaves in the bottom of my glass, I see something more akin to a SharePoint attack; Going after the S in SMB market.

App Engine allows for authenticating users via Google system, how much longer until we can interact with other Google services in a similar fashion?? Calendaring, GTalk, etc — I’m not talking mashups, something much more refined.

Grig has an interesting post today about enforcing checklists via nose, Agile Testing: Joel on checklists  Now that is an interesting idea.  I do lots of PCI compliance testing and documenting the tests and procedures is par for the course.  Automating those procedures goes a long way in helping out in this regard. Dora, handles scheduling, running and reporting which makes life nice, but I’ve got a variety of scripts and it would be nice to unify them in overall architecture.  Using nose could do just that.

Interesting things/thoughts happen when your programmers are sys-admins too.  This idea of translating the framework we use for testing code to testing systems has a number of interesting dimensions to it.  Just like Alton Brown, I insist that my tools multi-task too.