Migrating to Python 2.7, part 2: Webapp and templates
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under python, webapp2, python-27, jinja2, google-app-engine
In part 1 of the migration series, we discussed changes to your app to take advantage of the 2.7 runtime's support for multithreading. Today, we'll start looking at the changes to the included libraries, and how we'll have to modify our app to use them.
webapp2
First up is the replacement of App Engine's lightweight webapp framework with webapp2. Webapp2 is an external open-source project, which says it "follows the simplicity of webapp, but improves it in some ways: it adds better URI routing and exception handling, a full featured response object and a more flexible dispatching mechanism". Webapp2 does an excellent job of maintaining compatibility with webapp, which is why it was chosen as a replacement, but it also adds a number of useful improvements on it.
To see what's changed in concrete terms, let's assume we have a very straightforward app that looks something like this:
import os from google.appengine.ext import webapp from google.appengine.ext.webapp import template class BaseHandler(webapp.RequestHandler): def render_template(self, filename, **template_args): path = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'templates', filename) self.response.out.write(template.render(path, template_args)) class IndexHandler(BaseHandler ...
Migrating to Python 2.7, part 1: Threadsafe
Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under python, threading, python-27, google-app-engine
With the recent experimental release of Python 2.7 support, many people are starting to move their apps from the 2.5 runtime to 2.7. In this series of posts, I'll go over the various considerations for migrating your app in detail, starting with the most immediately obvious - and arguably biggest impact - of them all: threadsafe and multithreaded Python apps.
As you're probably aware, the 2.7 runtime supports making your Python app multithreaded, meaning a single instance of the app may service multiple user requests at the same time. Due to the Global Interpreter Lock, a multithreaded Python app still has limited concurrency, but since most of the wallclock time of a typical App Engine app is spent waiting for RPCs - during which the GIL is not held - the parallelism, and corresponding improvements in utilization, can be substantial.
Moving to Python 2.7 and enabling multithreading is pretty straightforward. First, you have to update your app.yaml. Suppose the start of your app.yaml looks something like this:
application: myapp version: main runtime: python api_version: 1
To switch to Python 2.7, you change it to this (changes are highlighted):
application: myapp version: main runtime: python27 ...