I’ve done it again and decided to change the technology I’m going to use to build LaG. Some my attribute this to technological ADD which I freely admit to, but this time I believe my reasons are substantive.
Uncertain Future of App Engine Patch
I was pretty excited about being able to use Django on Google App Engine with App Engine Patch. However, in recent weeks I noticed that most of the questions to the mailing list were only responded to by the original poster. I personally experienced this when I had a question about a problem loading fixtures and didn’t get a single reply. Then a recent thread on the future of App Engine Patch stated that the maintainers were looking into using a new Django-based framework. Well, I’m just not willing to invest my time in a dead framework. Strike 1.
Wary of Google App Engine
I’ve always been concerned about being locked into App Engine, but the lure of hosting that was free to start and could be scaled with usage needs was very attractive. My desire for a solution that is cheap to start and can scale with need is still very high, but I think there are enough ~$20 per month VPS solutions out there that I’m willing to forgo the $0 starting point for more freedom, control and flexibility. Check Swing.
Desire to Focus on Testing and BDD
Since I’m going to be the only QA for LaG (aside from the users 
, I really want to have as much automated testing in place as I can. Django and Python have plenty of facilities to do unit testing and BDD, but the community as a whole doesn’t focus much on it and there don’t seem to be a whole lot of best practices around it. While googling Python BDD, most of the references were to say, “We can do that with Doctest and py.test,” but not a whole lot of examples.
Back to the Bad Boy of Software Development
Since I was reevaluating my technology choices, I decided to check in on Rails which I hadn’t looked at in 2+ years. Part of the reason I moved away from the Ruby/Rails scene was that it seemed that things were always changing and not in just subtle ways. I felt like I couldn’t keep up with all that was going on and wanted more stable, measured approach to my choice of frameworks. Well, things haven’t changed much. There’s Rails + Merb = Rails 3, RSpec, Remarkable, Cucumber, etc. all still evolving at fast, if no longer breakneck, speed. But there was still the focus on testing and high quality code. There are also a lot of solutions to help with deployment that didn’t exist 2+ years ago. So I’m reacquainting myself with Rails and RSpec and getting an introduction to Cucumber by going through The RSpec Book beta. I’m feeling pretty confident that this will be the technology I stick with, but I’ve told myself that before.
