Google AppEngine

On every project I work on, at the minimum I start a git project so I can track changes and push to either Github or a local server running Git (all Git requires is a server running sshd).

One option is to create a model User in your own application, one of the things it contains would be the google user object.  In this case, you have your own ID generated by each instance of your Model, for each User. EJ: class User(db.Model):         googleUser = db.UserProperty()

You can use the RemoteDatastore class to upload or download from a   normal Java application to your local or a remote datastore.  It takes   care of setting up a dummy Environment and ApiProxy.Delegate for you.   You can then use then read local files unrestricted and use the low- level api to insert your data. http://code.google.com/p/remote-datastore/ You just need to call RemoteDatastore.install() and ignore the other   steps about connecting to a remote datastore.

What do I mean by life cycle events? Events like entity creation, entity update and entity deletion. Mainstream ORM systems popularised callbacks like oncreate, onupdate, ondelete. Introducing such callbacks in the Java and Python APIs may be easy, but things get messy when you consider the ecosystem of alternative language implementations based on the Java API: developers using alternative languages would be forced to use Java to write the callbacks. There is a more robust solution though. Google App Engine already leverages the power of webhooks in such APIs as taskqueue, email, xmpp and more. Webhooks can elegantly solve the life cycle management problem as well: when an entity is created, updated or deleted through the Datastore viewer a corresponding webhook is triggered. Let's say the user is playing with Article entities, the webhooks uris could be: http://myapp.com/_ah/admin/datastore/le/Article/create/{key} http://myapp.com/_ah/admin/datastore/le/Article/update/{key} http://myapp.com/_ah/admin/datastore/le/Article/delete/{key} Slightly more work than callbacks, but still simple and effective. If there is an even better solution, I would love to hear about it in the comments section.

Have you considered doing both? Then you could quickly get a list of computers a student owns by key OR use a query which returns results in some sorted order. I don't think maintaining a list of keys on the student model is as intimidating as you think.

A reference property simply stores the unique key of the entity it references. So the mother and father entities could each contain a copy of the key corresponding to their child

It sounds like the list property can't be appended to without a transaction?  If so, it seems it'll be better to create two tables, one for Users and one for Items.

It turns out that the Content-Type is also affecting the servers decision to compress the response. We were using applicaton/xml as Content-Type and when changing this to text/xml, the compression was enabled.

Developers building applications on top of Java App Engine can use the familiar java.net interface for making off-network calls. For simple requests, this should be more than sufficient. The low-level API, however, provides one feature not available in java.net: asynchronous URLFetch.

The one killer feature of App Engine’s low-level API that isn’t present in java.net is asynchronous URLFetch. What is asynchronous fetch? Let’s make an analogy: