Due to a busy week, we can only provide a short update this time.

Andy Smith from Google (and a Jaiku developer) has done a little presentation on Django on App Engine at the San Francisco Django Meetup on January 27th. Unfortunately, there is no video, but you can at least take a look at his slides. The talk was mostly about App Engine and the last third was about Django on App Engine. He also talked about the Django non-relational project, but nothing in depth and there were no demos. There were also a few other Google developers at the meetup, so hopefully we could get some more attention from Google and the Django community. We'd love to have some more impressions from people who attended the meetup. Were there any interesting questions?

Another little update is that recently I added "startswith" query support to the App Engine backend. It's based on the unicode trick described in the App Engine documentation. This means you'll need a composite index for this kind of query if you combine it with other filters and you can't order by a field other than the "startswith" filter's field. Still, this should help with getting more Django apps supported without any modifications.

If you want to write a backend for other non-relational DBs you might want to take another look at the App Engine backend. I've cleaned up the most important parts of the code and moved the reusable bits into a separate basecompiler module. It's still part of the App Engine backend because we need some more backends before we can agree on a common NonrelCompiler base class for all non-relational backends. The current NonrelCompiler provides functions for in-memory filtering and sorting of results. This is useful if your DB provides a separate API for fetching entities by primary key and doesn't support additional filter rules in that case.