Original creations in Second Life by Oggy Fink.

Saturday, February 7, 2015

Google App Engine Launcher

Recently I have been developing a web application in python in order to keep track of customer data in an update service. I used the wonderful Google App Engine framework and it does really a great job at providing a powerful and easy to use development environment.

However, I have been pulling my hair about the App Engine launcher that gets installed when you install the SDK on windows: while running my application from a local command line, the graphical user interface insisted on showing my application (added through the "Add existing application..." menu) in red, indicating an error. But which error ?

Today I found out why ! This is all because of an Unicode Byte Order Mark (BOM) in the app.yaml ! I was using the great Notepad++ to edit this essential file for the web application but was not aware that it was encoding it as utf-8 with BOM (which is an invisible mark at the beginning of the file).

Removing this BOM (in Notepad++'s Encoding menu, see image below) worked and now the launcher sees my application when I want to test it locally! Yay... I hope this tip is useful to someone.


3 comments:

  1. encode in UTF-8 without BOM isnt an option on my notepad++, know anything about that?

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  2. hah ok figured it out, the regular UTF-8 is default without BOM

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well maybe it's a difference in version numbers... My Np++ is v7.4.2 (at the time of this writing) and it's still as shown on the picture above. You'll probably get more info on their website.

    ReplyDelete

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