Back last May, Google released its SDK for App Engine and had an application launcher for Macintosh but not for Windows. This caused me to give all of my examples in the book using the command line in windows – it was pretty rough – particularly telling people when to press TAB to type in long and complex paths on XP to launch the App Engine web server.

I complained about this back in May at Google I/O.

So this Fall I vowed to write my own launcher for Windows – and for my launcher to be better than Google’s launcher and then port the launcher back to Macintosh and then I would become the Launcher-maker for App Engine – and thus promote my book.

Yesterday morning with a large cup of coffee I set out to build my Google App Engine Launcher with the following attributes:

• The EZ Launcher is designed for beginning users. It walks users through the
  install process and is continuously checking for mistakes the user might make
  such as starting more than one server.
• The EZ Launcher is designed to work with one application at a time – most
  users starting out have no real need for multiple applications running on
  different ports.
• The EZ Launcher has a simple text editor built in.

Eight hours and many cups of coffee later – the launcher was working on my developer environment and so it was time to do some QA on my other windows boxes. One feature is that EZ launcher checks for and guides you through pre-requisite installation. So I uninstalled the Google SDK on my test box to exercise this feature. EZ Launcher properly guided me to install the latest Google App Engine SDK (1.25 – released September 3, 2009).

After the install, I saw *two* App Engine Launchers! What had gone wrong? It turns out that Google had just finished a Python version of their launcher and included it in the Windows SDK! Like 30 days ago! Why didn’t someone tell me this!

I played with their launcher – it is written in Python – and they imitated the Mac launcher. I was going to throw away my EZ launcher – but then decided that I might as well release it and see if folks like it. I still think that it is superior in usability to the Google Launcher.

Here is the documentation: http://www.appenginelearn.com/ezlaunch.htm

And here is a picture of it in action:

I don’t know where I want to take this application. If folks use it and like it – I am happy to support it. It only took nine hours to write – support cannot be that bad. If folks really like it – I could write a Mac version too. I would really think it cool if an SI usability course took a look at it and made it function better and look flashier (i.e. not just a lot of text buttons).