Comments on: Google App Engine, Django, Flex, and Facebook http://blog.foomonger.com/2009/10/08/google-app-engine-django-flex-and-facebook/ Tips and Musings on Software Development, Flash, and Flex Fri, 03 Sep 2010 23:12:38 -0500 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Alan Anderson http://blog.foomonger.com/2009/10/08/google-app-engine-django-flex-and-facebook/comment-page-1/#comment-586 Alan Anderson Tue, 29 Jun 2010 23:17:57 +0000 http://blog.foomonger.com/?p=12#comment-586 Sam, I am happy to have stumbled upon this entry in your blog as I have a couple of Flex RIAs I am considering developing and have been exploring the possiblities for the server-side parts. One of the possiblities that I am intrigued by is using the Googel App Engine, its Datastore, and somehow implementing AMF remoting with my Flex frontend. That seems to be exactly what you have done. Your post is informative and well-written. I am a seasoned veteran of years of software development, but I am a newbie or near-newbie to most of the technology involved in this--Flex, Python, GAE, the GAE Datastore, PyAMF, etc. Today I have been trying to wrap my mind around the non-relational datastore, and it has been difficult to shift away from the RDBMS paradigm. But what I think I am beginning to see is that one can model the data structure in the GAE datastore as if it were relational with normalization and all that using the ReferenceProperty class. (See "References" topic at http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastore/entitiesandmodels.html#References.) Although the GAE Datastore doesn't do cascading deletes or anything to insure relational integrity (that has to be done by the datastore client) is seems to me that is not too big a deal because (they say) there are some Python classes that help with that, and any disadvantages are offset all the wonderful things theGAE Datastore does for you (scaling, redeundancy, etc.) and its use of indexes for commonly used queries to make queries fast. It is akin to a technology called Rushmore in Visual FoxPro that makes queries very fast. Anyhow, when I get a little farther into it, I would like to discuss some of these issues with you and if you have time possibly engage you for some consulting/development services. Please let me know if that is a possiblity. -Alan Sam, I am happy to have stumbled upon this entry in your blog as I have a couple of Flex RIAs I am considering developing and have been exploring the possiblities for the server-side parts. One of the possiblities that I am intrigued by is using the Googel App Engine, its Datastore, and somehow implementing AMF remoting with my Flex frontend. That seems to be exactly what you have done. Your post is informative and well-written.

I am a seasoned veteran of years of software development, but I am a newbie or near-newbie to most of the technology involved in this–Flex, Python, GAE, the GAE Datastore, PyAMF, etc. Today I have been trying to wrap my mind around the non-relational datastore, and it has been difficult to shift away from the RDBMS paradigm. But what I think I am beginning to see is that one can model the data structure in the GAE datastore as if it were relational with normalization and all that using the ReferenceProperty class. (See “References” topic at http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/datastore/entitiesandmodels.html#References.) Although the GAE Datastore doesn’t do cascading deletes or anything to insure relational integrity (that has to be done by the datastore client) is seems to me that is not too big a deal because (they say) there are some Python classes that help with that, and any disadvantages are offset all the wonderful things theGAE Datastore does for you (scaling, redeundancy, etc.) and its use of indexes for commonly used queries to make queries fast. It is akin to a technology called Rushmore in Visual FoxPro that makes queries very fast.

Anyhow, when I get a little farther into it, I would like to discuss some of these issues with you and if you have time possibly engage you for some consulting/development services. Please let me know if that is a possiblity.

-Alan

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