magpiebrain

I’ve been working on a couple of spare time projects, both of which I hope to release more formally in the next few weeks. One of them involves development of a simple web application for deployment on Google App Engine. As part of the development, I had to modify an existing open source Clojure API – my changes are now available for all.

appengine-clj was written by ThoughtWorks colleague John Hume. It provides some Clojure-esque wrappers over Google App Engine’s user authentication and low level datastore API. John outlines his use of the library in a highly useful post on using Compojure & Clojure on the App Engine – it was this post which helped immensely in getting started myself.

There were a couple of minor issues with the latest version of John’s API which stopped me from being able to use it for my latest project – so I created a fork to make the changes I wanted. First, a general issue. I love projects which make checkout and build easy and bullet-proof. For me, that means check in the build tool & all dependencies. I know this is a contentious point – I may well write a post on it later. The other issue is that since the 1.2 version of the SDK some of the APIs have changed a little, so I updated the datastore testing macro accordingly.

My Clojure skills are highly limited, and the modest modifications are probably botched, but nonetheless it seems to work. My fork can be found on GitHub.