At VendAsta we frequently share libraries of code between projects. To make it easier to share this code I’ve developed a small package manager that downloads code within a directory from Github to be copied in to your current project. It’s a quick and dirty alternative to cloning an entire repository, grabbing the set of files you want and placing them in your project. ...

In App Engine the auto_now option sets a property to the current date/time whenever the entity is created or updated. This is a great feature for tracking the time when an entity was last updated. However, sometimes you may want to put an entity without updating an auto_now timestamp. This article will show you how. ...

View all articles in the MapReduce API Series. So far we’ve looked at using MapReduce pipelines to perform calculations over large data sets and combined multiple pipelines in succession. In this article we will look at how to reduce the amount of data transfer by using a combiner. ...

View all articles in the MapReduce API Series. Last time we looked at how to run a full MapReduce Pipeline to count the number of occurrences of a character within each string. In this post we will see how to chain multiple MapReduce Pipelines together to perform sequential tasks. ...

I recently tried installing lxml for use within an App Engine project on OS X Mavericks only to be hit with an error message from clang. ...

View all articles in the MapReduce API Series. In the last article we examined how to run one-off tasks that operate on a large dataset using a mapreduce.yaml configuration file. This article will take us a step further and look at how to run a MapReduce job programmatically using the App Engine Pipeline API. ...

View all articles in the MapReduce API Series. Last time we looked at an overview of how MapReduce works. In this article we’ll be getting our hands dirty writing some code to handle the Map Stage. If you’ll recall, the Map Stage is composed of two separate components: an InputReader and a map function. We’ll look at each of these in turn. ...

View all articles in the MapReduce API Series. The first arcticle in this series provides an overview of the App Engine MapReduce API. We will give a basic overview of what MapReduce is and how it is used to do parallel and distributed processing of large datasets. ...

The typical update cycle for an API resource is to (1) GET the representation, (2) modify it and (3) PUT back the entire representation. This can waste bandwidth and processing time for large resources. An alternative is to use the HTTP PATCH extension method to only send the differences between two resources. HTTP PATCH applies a set of changes to the document referenced by the HTTP request. ...

API versioning is a fact of life. Even the most well designed API changes as new features and relationships are uncovered. Unfortunately, updating an API is seldom as simple as changing the behaviour of our existing URL endpoints on her he server. If we have existing clients we need to explicitly advertise breaking changes in a seamless way. This article explains a few methods of specifying breaking changes that offer a clear upgrade path for existing API clients. ...