Under the hood with App Engine APIs
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under python, app-engine, coding, datastore
In the past, I've discussed various details of the way various App Engine APIs work under the hood. If you've used certain tools, such as Appstats, too, you probably already have a basic overview of how the App Engine APIs function. Today, we'll take a closer look at the interface between the App Engine runtime and its APIs and how it works, and learn what that means for the platform.
If you're interested in App Engine purely to write straightforward webapps, you can probably stop reading now. If you're interested in low-level optimisations, or in the platform itself, or you want to write a library or tool that tinkers with the innermost parts of App Engine, then read on!
The generic API interface
Ultimately, every API call comes down to a single generic interface, with 4 arguments: the service name (for example, 'datastore_v3' or 'memcache'), the method name (for example, 'Get' or 'RunQuery'), the request, and the response. The request and response components are both Protocol Buffers, a binary format widely used at Google for exchanging structured data between processes. The specific type of the request and response protocol buffers for an API call depend ...
An experiment in interactive blogging
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under blogging
First up, apologies for the recent inactivity here. I've had some pretty tough stuff to deal with in my personal life recently, and that's had to take priority over my blogging schedule. Rest assured that I do intend to return to a regular posting schedule, but in the short term, things may remain a little irregular. That said, there will be a post later this week, so it's not all doom and gloom.
Second, I'm now officially relocating to Sydney! Don't worry, I'll still be working on the App Engine team, but the Google office in Sydney has a substantial App Engine contingent, so I'll no longer be working alone in the Dublin office. It's also much, much closer to home for me, so I may get to see my family more than once a year or so. Finally, the weather is better. I expect to move early November, which will be another excuse for any raggedness in the blogging schedule.
Finally, the main subject of this post: I've decided to try a little experiment. I always have several post ideas in the pipeline, and readers often give me interesting new ...