Python 2.7 goes live on Google's App Engine

Google has announced that the previously experimental version of Python 2.7, available on its App Engine platform, is now a fully supported feature. Python 2.7 brings numerous enhancements to App Engine's support for Python, including support for multithreading, handling concurrent requests, uploading Python bytecode, bytecode generation and manipulating libraries and native JSON. The multithreading and concurrent request support should, says Google, allow developers to fully utilise the CPU.

The Google developers have also added the Python Imaging Library (PIL), scientific computing library NumPy and XML/HTML processing library lxml to the App Engine runtime for Python. The new runtime only supports version 1.2 of the Django framework, where previous versions supported Django 0.96 and 1.2, so developers will have to update their older Django-based applications. Support for Djangoforms has been removed; Google suggests WTForms as a possible alternative.

Other changes are listed in a What's New in Python 2.7 guide. A new App Engine SDK for Python is available to download and a Getting Started guide for developers new to the platform introduces the App Engine and Python 2.7. App Engine is a commercially charged system, but Google says applications can use 1GB of storage and "enough CPU and bandwidth to support an efficient app serving around 5 million page views a month", for free.

Python 2.7 is the last branch of the Python 2 series which has been superseded by Python 3. Python's creator describes Python 2 as "the status quo" and Python 3 as "the present and future of the language". Python 3 is not on the roadmap for Google's App Engine, because a number of essential libraries need to be ported to Python 3.

(djwm)