Been battling this slow AppEngine local Web server much of today. Finally found a solution: don't connect to:

http://localhost:8080

but rather, connect to:

http://127.0.0.1:8080

This results in a savings of 1 second per request.

What the heck is (was) going on, I'm not really sure! I was surprised to see the second line in my hosts file:

127.0.0.1 localhost
::1 localhost

I think this is for IPV6 - but my first thought was that it's supposed "add 1 second delay"!

An interesting technical note on Google App Engine. It is possible to get results back from a query that DO NOT match the predicate of the query.

This is because the data is committed first, and the indexes are committed later. So, there is a small window of time where results can be included in a query that don't actually satisfy the conditions.

The converse is also true. If you change data, and then perform a query expecting to retrieve the data you just modified, it may not be returned even though the change was committed.

These kind of race conditions could make some applications tricky to perform correctly.

A quick "mashup" using the Google Mashup Editor. Has this really been in beta for a year? I just took note, and got into the (closed?) beta.

I'm note sure I get the point. You pretty much have to be a developer to write these things, but I don't think you get much more functionality than just writing to their JavaScript API's.

What's the market for these things (or maybe that's why it's not gone public). Competes with Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly.

When iGoogle launches their new canvas and Open Social features, Google's personalized home page is going to bear a strong resemblance to the Facebook home page.

With 10's of millions of users using iGoogle, this could be back-door competition for Favebook and other social networks, by just integrated the news feed functionality into each user's home page.

The new memcache interface available on Google AppEngine.

click to play

First day of Google IO - Keynote - 1:30.

Speakers [video time code]:

Vic Gundotra - Engineering VP
Allen Hurff, MySpace (lame)
Steve Horowitz - Android (mobile platform - cool demo) [0:22]
Kevin Gibbs - App Engine [0:33]
Mark Lucovsky - GData and AJAX API's [0:44]
Bruce Johnson - GWT Google Web Toolkit [0.55]
David Glazer - Open Social [1:09]
Nat Brown, iLike

I like Google's method of doing "AJAX" APi calls. The REST request is made by setting a callback (function name), and context (string). When the SCRIPT tag is returned, it will call your function:

callback(context, response, status, error-string)

Allows for multiple outstanding calls at one time and to hook up the correct response with the correct caller.

My first Google App Engine application is now deployed! Not much more than "hello world", but this was so easy!