Cool NetBeans Plugin

Last week at AJUG's Devnexus conference Venkat Subramanium made an interesting point about IDEs.

He asked how many of the people in attendance used Eclipse. Unsurprisingly almost everyone raised a hand.

Then he asked how many of us would use it if it cost $500. Almost all of the hands dropped, including mine.

I downloaded NetBeans and IntelliJ.

I had used NetBeans for a while before. One thing I liked was its themes. I like light text on a dark background.

I found this theme, Aloha, and installed it. Pretty nice.

Django Nonrel and Google App Engine

The guys behind appengine patch have a new project using the Django nonrel project to run on App Engine.

Clone the appropriate projects from bitbucket :

$ hg clone https://[Bitbucket User Name]@bitbucket.org/wkornewald/django-nonrel/
$ hg clone https://[Bitbucket User Name]@bitbucket.org/wkornewald/djangoappengine/
$ hg clone https://[Bitbucket User Name]@bitbucket.org/wkornewald/django-testapp/

The instructions say next, "Now you should be able to create a new app in the testapp folder and use native Django models on App Engine. Try it!"

dignan@dignan-laptop:~/workspace/django-nonrel/django-testapp$ python manage.py runserver
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "manage.py", line 4, in <module>
from djangoappengine.boot import setup_env
ImportError: No module named djangoappengine.boot

Hmmm.

The documentation calls for two symlinks :

django-testapp/common-apps/djangoappengine -> ../../djangoappengine

django-testapp/common-apps/djangoappengine -> ../../django-nonrel/django

I created them and tried again.

The Google App Engine SDK could not be found!
Make sure it's accessible via your PATH environment.

So I added the it to my path and tried again. Same result.

I found the following on the appengine-patch website:

"you can also put the SDK into any folder that is in the system's PATH environment variable as long as it's called "google_appengine" (this works with any OS)"

My sdk was in "google_appengine_1.3.0". I created a symlink, "google_appengine" and tried again.

/home/dignan/tools/appengine/google_appengine_1.3.0/google/appengine/api/datastore_file_stub.py:40: DeprecationWarning: the md5 module is deprecated; use hashlib instead                                                             
import md5                                                                                                    
/home/dignan/tools/appengine/google_appengine_1.3.0/google/appengine/api/memcache/__init__.py:31: DeprecationWarning: the sha module is deprecated; use the hashlib module instead                                                    
import sha
WARNING  2010-03-10 22:41:09,468 datastore_file_stub.py:483] Could not read datastore data from /tmp/django_nonreltest.datastore
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "workspace/django-norel/django-testapp/manage.py", line 16, in <module>
execute_manager(settings)
File "/home/dignan/workspace/django-norel/django-testapp/common-apps/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 438, in execute_manager
utility.execute()
File "/home/dignan/workspace/django-norel/django-testapp/common-apps/django/core/management/__init__.py", line 379, in execute
self.fetch_command(subcommand).run_from_argv(self.argv)
File "workspace/django-norel/django-testapp/common-apps/djangoappengine/management/commands/runserver.py", line 88, in run_from_argv
start_dev_appserver(argv)
File "workspace/django-norel/django-testapp/common-apps/djangoappengine/management/commands/runserver.py", line 74, in start_dev_appserver
dev_appserver_main.main([progname] + args + [os.getcwdu()])
File "/home/dignan/tools/appengine/google_appengine_1.3.0/google/appengine/tools/dev_appserver_main.py", line 360, in main
config, matcher = dev_appserver.LoadAppConfig(root_path, {})
File "/home/dignan/tools/appengine/google_appengine_1.3.0/google/appengine/tools/dev_appserver.py", line 3441, in LoadAppConfig
raise AppConfigNotFoundError
google.appengine.tools.dev_appserver.AppConfigNotFoundError

At least it started! I cd'd into the app's directory and ran:

python manage.py runserver

It started up. I got the default "It worked!" page.