Google App Engine Gotcha 1

I like Google App Engine. However, there are a number of gotchas that can creep up on you. Especially if you dive right in without doing any reading first.

Here’s gotcha #1…

A number of standard Python modules are not available or only provide limited functionality. Click here to see Google App Engine’s list of enabled, partially-enabled and empty modules.

Sometimes developing for Google App Engine isn’t straightforward and requires a little imagination. However, most of the time there’s a simple alternative; it just takes a little reading. For example, if you want to send e-mail on Google App Engine you can’t use Python’s smtplib (because it relies on socket, which is implemented as an empty module). Instead, you would do the following:

```python
from google.appengine.api import mail
mail.send_mail(
    sender="<from address>",
    to="<to address>",
    subject="sending e-mail on Google App Engine...",
    body="... is easy once you know how"
)

There are more gotchas, this is just the first that I've had time to write about. Stay tuned...