Django & App Engine - 2012 Refresh

Question

Before you close the topic, yes it's been asked before, but the last time was early 2010.

Are there any up-to-date efforts to use Django on GAE? Django-norel seems a little dated, along with its effort to get JOINs (and hence Many-to-Many, which I need). I haven't gone too far with Django, so if I'd save myself a headache by changing to a different framework that still has ORM, I'll accept that as a good answer too.

In the long run, I'm trying to run something with the ORM capabilities of Django, and the template capabilities of Django, on Google App Engine, so I'll take whatever solution meets my needs.

(For future readers, I ended up using Flask, and the Google App Engine's inbuilt datastore models.)

Answer 1

Django-nonrel is not dated. Yes, former developers left the project, but it has been picked up and developed on github: https://github.com/django-nonrel

Basically you have 2 choices with running Django on GAE:
1. Use Django-nonrel and Google AppEngine's storage. Your data will be stored in a NoSQL database, which has its limits and advantages, but you can still mostly use Django's ORM classes.
2. Use regular Django and Google Cloud SQL. Cloud SQL is basically MySQL in the cloud: it should be very familiar for most developers

Google Cloud SQL is currently in preview. You can use it for free, but your database size is limited to 10Gb. The FAQ says:

We will not be billing for this service in 2011. We will give you at least 30 days’ advance notice before we begin billing in the future.

The pricing of AppEngine's Datastore is described here

Answer 2

Yes, there's support for Django on Google App Engine currently. Check https://developers.google.com/cloud-sql/docs/django

Today, you need to make a request for a limited preview: https://developers.google.com/cloud-sql/docs/before_you_begin

They took less than a week to answer my request.