Getting Started With Google App Engine on Windows

If you are planning to get started with Google App Engine on Windows, this note that I have written last year may help. 

I will be using Python for my development, so will be installing App Engine environment for Python.

Python

• Install Python 2.6.4 version from http://www.python.org/download/ I was little tempted to have the latest version 3.1.1 but read in the release notes that 3.1.1 by design is NOT backward compatible. So it may not work with Google App Engine. So just stick to 2.6.4
• Install PIL Module required for Image manipulation on Google App Engine.

Google App Engine SDK for Python

Install Google App Engine SDK from Google App Engine Downloads page. Latest version at this time is 1.3.0 released on 12/14/2009. 

Update:  Latest version of Python is 2.7.1 and App Engine SDK on Python as of 13 January 2011 is 1.4.1

This is all we need to start over working on Google App Engine. We can use Google App Engine Launcher to create a new app, run the app or even deploy the app to Google App Engine.  We can just use the IDLE editor that comes with Python installation to view and edit Python files.

It may just take about 10 minutes for both of these installations.

If you are really serious about developing apps on Google App Engine, then it may be helpful to use an IDE and some source code repository. So keep going : 

• Tortoise  is a nice Subversion client for Windows and you can download it from http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads.
• If you don’t have a SVN or other repository, try unfuddle. Its really great and Free.
• Of the available IDEs, I really liked Aptana Studio.  You can get it here: Aptana Studio . Once studio is installed, get PyDev plugin from Plugins tab on the studio.

It may take about another 10 more minutes to install Tortoise, Aptana and setup SVN repository. 

Hope that helps.