I just found out about Google App Engine. Does anyone else feel as overwhelmed as I do? This changes everything for us Python Web guys.
I decided to give Ubuntu 20.04 a try on my 2015 15" MacBook Pro. I didn't actually install it; I just live booted from a USB thumb drive which was enough to try out everything I wanted. In summary, it's not perfect, and issues with my camera would prevent me from switching, but given the right hardware, I think it's a really viable option. The first thing I wanted to try was what would happen if I plugged in a non-HiDPI screen given that my laptop has a HiDPI screen. Without sub-pixel scaling, whatever scale rate I picked for one screen would apply to the other. However, once I turned on sub-pixel scaling, I was able to pick different scale rates for the internal and external displays. That looked ok. I tried plugging in and unplugging multiple times, and it didn't crash. I doubt it'd work with my Thunderbolt display at work, but it worked fine for my HDMI displays at home. I even plugged it into my TV, and it stuck to the 100% scaling I picked for the othe
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This could make Python the next PHP. (And maybe in the bad ways too ;)
Open source web applications could, like, really work. Normal people could install a web application like they install normal applications.
For GAE to change the game, I would think they'd have to make it a lot easier for people to create web apps (not "here's some of django and some other CGI you can use").
GQL is especially weird, since it's a limited SQL-ish thing that no one else supports or necessarily will support. I'm a fan of the new SPARQL language for querying RDF, partly because SPARQL is the kind of standard system that google *could* map to their database. RDF predicates (aka google datastore 'keys' aka SQL 'columns') are more precise than any of the other systems, so it's never lossy to adapt an existing DB system to RDF.
Doesn't facebook have an FBQL that's also an arbitrarily reduced version of SQL? Maybe it's not for the same purpose at all, but just the presence of these things is training everyone to accept a new, proprietary query language for every system we deal with :(