Google AppEngine App issues on Snow Leopard

I always seem to trip up on these language version issues. I spent way too much time on this so, as usual with such things, I thought it was worth a post. Early this week I upgraded my work machine (MacBook Pro) and the new machine came packed with Snow Leopard. Today, I had some free time so I figured I’d modify this “lab” project that a few of us worked on at Comcast Interactive Media a few months ago.

I use the GoogleAppEngineLauncher application to start/stop the apps and it seemed to launch fine once I had the code checked out from SVN. However one part of the application, which loaded some remote data and stored it in the DataStore didnt seem to work anymore. Stilling digging through what could have gone wrong, I ended up isolating the issue with the invocation of urllib2. Looking through Google’s documentation, I tried switching to URLFetch which fixed that part. But a couple of lines later, I tripped over another issue. This time the error was a lot more explicit with some message mentioning a missing __init__ in the 2.6 version of Python. So I tried switching the Python location in the /usr/bin/python to the 2.5 version but that didn’t work. Turns out to switch the Python version on the launcher, you have to set the value in the Preferences panel for the application as mentioned here. Ta daa! That worked.

Note, if you are using the command line dev_appserver.py script to run your application, check out this post here

Author: Arpit Mathur

Arpit Mathur is a Principal Engineer at Comcast Labs where he is currently working on a variety of topics including Machine Learning, Affective Computing, and Blockchain applications. Arpit has also worked extensively on Android and iOS applications, Virtual Reality apps as well as with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML and Ruby on Rails. He also spent a couple of years in the User Experience team as a Creative Technologist. View all posts by Arpit Mathur