Google App Engine: Uploading Data Tutorial

If you are my regular blog readers, you probably can safely skip this article. (Yup, you got my permission! )

I’m going to talk about the gory details of bulkloading Google App Engine’s (GAE) ReferenceProperty and ListProperty, the two properties that confuse most developers due to the lack of documentation. We’ll use my app, Amanda & Jennifer’s Art Gallery, for this tutorial. Hopefully this will help you save some frustrating hours!

If you find any mistakes or a better way to implement anything in this article, please let me know! I’m always up for learning new techniques and improving my code.

Amanda & Jennifer’s Art Gallery v.2

Version 2 is completed! I’ve been busy with job hunting these days and couldn’t work on v.2 as much as I would like. But, anyway, now all pages under artists, media, and subjects are dynamically generated. With the RESTful architecture, all the URLs are beautiful. (See how pretty it is in the above updated screenshot? “http://aj-gallery.appspot.com/artists/Amanda!) Check it out and see for yourselves!

To see more design details, please check here

My First facebook App

Yup, yup, you heard me right! I built my first Facebook app — Amanda & Jennifer’s Art Gallery! Now our gallery got one more place for millions to enjoy!

Unlike the original site, this app does not require any technical skills. Through the Gift Creator app, everyone can build a site for friends and family to share gifts in no time. All you need just a theme, a group of photos, and some description for your app, and you are ready to build your app!

How comes the challenge: To make my app be noticed and used. Beside bagging and pleading friends to use it, I’m not quite sure what else one can do. As more and more apps being developed on the Facebook platform (How many are there now?), it surely gets tougher and tougher to compete for users.

A piece of nice artwork, anyone?

[05/25/2009] It’s unclear to me if it’s caused by the Facebook or the Gift Creator, but it’s been flaky to send gifts to friends. Worse, when the erratic problem occurs, my daily gift quota is gone, and that’s 50% of the time ever since I launched my little app!

DVG – Day 24

Getting close for the prime time!

Happy Blueberries (快樂的小藍莓)

Even though this year we won’t get to taste our apricots (The lone apricot is nowhere to be seen now… ), our blueberry bush, on the other hand, is having a grand time. We’ve never seen so many blueberries on it ever since we moved in!

The blueberry flowered in March, right after a cold, windy, and rainy February that knocked down just about all our apricot and more than half of our plum flowers. I saw one lone bumblebee working diligently on it everyday. I appreciated its effort but didn’t expect anything extraordinary to come out of it. But, wow, I was wrong! And this is one of the few occasions that I’m happily being wrong! Blueberry muffins, blueberry pancakes, blueberry granola, blueberry… oh my! Our summer breakfast will be a series of happy blueberry songs!

Sold One Photo! (賣了張照片!)

Believe or not, I sold the sea cucumbers (海參) photo on the left! (Yes, I have the check in my hand!) Even though several people had asked me in the past to use my photos on their websites, this is the first time that someone actually requested to buy one. Even better, it’s for an upcoming book called “Animal Review” and I’ll get the photo credit, too! David joked that I’m gonna be famous now!

I did secretly dreamed about selling my photos, but it never occurred to me that this one would be one of them. When I mentioned my surprise to Chris, he replied:

From what I understand and have read, people that want to buy a photo for use want a photo that shows something usually specific. It needs to be a well done photo (good composition, exposure, etc) but not, as you say, artistic.

Well, my sea cucumbers photo definitely is unusual and specific; that much I agree.

To help me become more famous, you are all encouraged to get a copy of the very funny “Animal Review” when it comes out next April. And, don’t worry, I’ll remind you when that happens.

Amanda & Jennifer’s Art Gallery

After being antisocial for 10 days (including neglecting my blog), I finally got my new website (powered by Google App Engine or GAE) up and running. Here is the URL for the curious ones:

http://aj-gallery.appspot.com/

Version 1 (v.1) is mostly built with HTML and CSS, some JavaScript (the jQuery library to be specific) for the cool effects, and a small Python program to drive the site. For v.1, my main focus is to get the Look & Feel (L&F) right and to have the functionality in place. On top of that, the navigation layout has to be so clear that even someone knowing no English has no chance of getting lost. But for v.2, GAE’s webapp framework will take the center stage; with its simple but elegant Big Table Datastore and Django templates, I can finally get rid of all the hardcoded HTML files and dynamically generate the site content. (Thank Goodness!)

Admittedly v.1 looks rather simple, but, boy oh boy, it’s not a small task for me. Even though I had a pretty good idea what I wanted and was able to draw my designs on paper, converting my idea to the screen has proven challenging. Also, not being familiar with graphics design tools (I’m drooling over Adobe CS4 Web Premium… but shop here or here for less $) means that I have to settle with simple solid colors and apply graphics designed by others. (The one exception: I did build the site logo with the help of Icon Generator through Antonio Lupetti’s recommendation.) If I have time after v.2, I’d really like to learn the graphics design trade by following lynda.com’s excellent online training classes. (Too bad that most of their classes on Safari are for CS3 and older.)

Enough about the behind-the-scene stories; I hope that you enjoy our gallery as much as we do!

[05/13/2009] Version 1 is now feature complete!

[05/15/2009] David’s suggestion: Once I have v.2 running, I should probably implement it in different web frameworks as an exercise. I like that idea! I’m thinking that v.3 will be in Django and v.4 in Pylons, and that should give me a pretty good idea of the pros and cons among the three Python web frameworks.

[05/24/2009] Version 2 is here.