Google Busts the Web Wide Open - In Python!

Well, if ever there was a compelling reason for using Python it's probably Google App Engine. Here's the canonical "hello world" Google App:

print 'Content-Type: text/plain'
print ''
print 'Hello, world!'

Doesn't get a lot simpler than that, does it?

There's a lot behind this announcement, including a detailed description of the data store (which interestingly seems to bear the same kind of relationship to a classical relational database that Python does to statically-typed languages), access to some of the attributes of authenticated Google account users, the ability to fetch remote URLs and a startlingly straightforward way to send email.

If I were going to write another book about Python web programming I wouldn't be able to ignore this development. What a tempting idea ...