I’ve been meaning to write a nontrivial app using Google App Engine for a while, and here’s my first weekend project: Decklist Sharing Tool, an tool for MTG players to share decklists online.
I had the decklist parsing and autocarding code available for a while (and used on my MTG related posts), so that part was fairly easy, I got it done under 3 hours I think. The rest of the time (around 5-ish hours) was spent on glue logic, fixing minor bugs, working on HTML layout, cleaning up text, etc. It feels pretty good for a one manday effort, let’s see if it breaks down. Not the best code I’ve ever written though (until the latest upload the main class was named “hello.py”)
Some notes:
- the Django template engine included with GAE seems to be earlier than version 1, as the escapejs filter wasn’t available and I had to write it myself. Still, being familiar with the Django template engine helped a lot
- WordPress.com blogs don’t allow Javascript inside the posts, so the blog sharing code I provide won’t work there. It works on Blogger though. I’ll look for a workaround… (iframes?)
- I’ve yet to try using memcache, so the current version doesn’t cache anything, I mean to try it in a future version
- yes, I put adsense ads there. I was like, why not? 😀
Update May 2020: The app used to be deployed on Google App Engine, but is no longer available. I’ve since uploaded the code to Github at https://github.com/roytang/mtg-utils
See Also