I’ve been playing around with Google App Engine to create something that resembles a Tickler File.

What’s a Tickler File?

“A tickler file is a collection of date-labeled file folder organized in a way that allows time-sensitive documents to be filed according to the future date on which each document needs action.”

Things you can do with a tickler file:

• send yourself motivational quotes and photos
• remember birthdays, meetings, appointments
• actually send yourself an article at a time when you are likely to read it
• review your cliff notes the day before the big meeting
• divide course material up into consumable, accessible chunks

An interesting part of GAE has been the Task Queues which come in pretty handy when scheduling things.

TaskOptions taskOptions = TaskOptions.Builder.url("/emailDaylog")
.param("address", user.getEmail())
.param("content", daylog.getContent());

Queue queue = QueueFactory.getDefaultQueue();
queue.add(taskOptions.countdownMillis(DEFAULT_REMINDER_WAIT));

I don’t do python… yet, at least. :) Settle down; I’ve got it on my to-do list.

But wanting to see what Google App Engine was all about, I downloaded the sdk and signed up for an account.

In the app.yaml file—where you can specify the version of the application and other meta information about your application, I noticed that a runtime can also be specified and by default it is set to python. The documentation for Google App Engine notes that…

This code runs in the python runtime environment, version “1”. Additional runtime environments and languages may be supported in the future.

So, for those of you who don’t do python either… there’s hope. Or you could do something quiet strange, like this! Yikes!

Another interesting tidbit is that some subset of Django is included with Google App Engine. Let’s play.