Well I thought I’d give writing for the Google AppEngine a try and have found it a delightful platform to work with. Easy deployment, easy scalability (the DataStore non-RDBMS is a bit harder to get your mind around), and a squeaky clean WebOb-based WSGI minimalist framework called WebApp. Anyways, in developing a simple REST service, I ran across a great place to use Python Decorators. I needed to restrict access to a specific REST method based on IP Address so I wrote the following decorator:

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def bind_ip(ips):
    def _dec(handler):
        def _check_ip(self, *args, **kwargs):            
            if self.request.remote_addr in ips:
                return handler(self, *args, **kwargs)
            else:
                  self.error(403)
        return _check_ip
    return _dec

The decorator returns a closure which only calls the method it encapsulates if the IP address of the client is specifically allowed. Notice the @bind_ip on line 11

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import wsgiref.handlers
from google.appengine.ext import webapp
from util import bind_ip
 
allowed_ips = set([
    '127.0.0.1',
    'ip.of.rest.client'
    ])
 
class SecretHandler(webapp.RequestHandler):
  @bind_ip(allowed_ips)
  def get(self, secret):
     """ Do something Secret """
     self.response.out.write (secret)
 
def main():
  application = webapp.WSGIApplication([
          (r'/secret/(.*)', SecretHandler)
      ])
  wsgiref.handlers.CGIHandler().run(application)
 
if __name__ == '__main__':
  main()

Decorators are a simple way to easily annotate how functions should be called, and can be used for Authentication, Data Validation or however else you’d like to use them.

After many months of dissatisfaction regarding PHP (especially its Unicode Support), I decided to rewrite AjaxTrans in mod_python. A language which has allowed a much greater flexibility in the area of character sets. This transition has allowed me to incorporate 4 new languages into AjaxTrans:

1. Chinese
2. Japanese
3. Korean
4. Russian

Enjoy!

PS: Comment on any bugs/errors/interface mistakes (The spanish interface translation is likely full of errors as it’s written by a student who’s only currently taking Spanish… in High-School—me) feedback much appreciated, also translations of the interface into your language would be greatly welcome.