R – What’s the simplest, most concise web technology to build an app with on Google App Engine

I know this is going to seem old-fashioned, but I don't think much of using online tutorials to learn programming languages or platforms. These generally give you no more than a little taste of the language. To really learn a language, you need the equivalent of a "book", and in many cases, this means a real dead-tree book.

If you want to learn C, read K&R. If you want to learn C++, read Stroustrup. If you want to learn Lisp/Scheme, read SICP. Etc.

If you're not willing to spend more than $30 and a few hours to learn a language, you probably aren't going to learn it.

First, I would suggest you have a look at "Rapid Development with Python, Django, and Google App Engine"

GvR describes a general/standard project layout on page 10 of his slide presentation.

Here I'll post a slightly modified version of the layout/structure from that page. I pretty much follow this pattern myself. You also mentioned you had trouble with packages. Just make sure each of your sub folders has an __init__.py file. It's ok if its empty.

Boilerplate files

• These hardly vary between projects
• app.yaml: direct all non-static requests to main.py
• main.py: initialize app and send it all requests

Project lay-out

• static/*: static files; served directly by App Engine
• myapp/*.py: app-specific python code
  • views.py, models.py, tests.py, __init__.py, and more
• templates/*.html: templates (or myapp/templates/*.html)

Here are some code examples that may help as well:

main.py

import wsgiref.handlers

from google.appengine.ext import webapp
from myapp.views import *

application = webapp.WSGIApplication([
  ('/', IndexHandler),
  ('/foo', FooHandler)
], debug=True)

def main():
  wsgiref.handlers.CGIHandler().run(application)

myapp/views.py

import os
import datetime
import logging
import time

from google.appengine.api import urlfetch
from google.appengine.ext.webapp import template
from google.appengine.api import users
from google.appengine.ext import webapp
from models import *

class IndexHandler(webapp.RequestHandler):
  def get(self):
    date = "foo"
    # Do some processing        
    template_values = {'data': data }
    path = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__) + '/../templates/', 'main.html')
    self.response.out.write(template.render(path, template_values))

class FooHandler(webapp.RequestHandler):
  def get(self):
    #logging.debug("start of handler")

myapp/models.py

from google.appengine.ext import db

class SampleModel(db.Model):

I think this layout works great for new and relatively small to medium projects. For larger projects I would suggest breaking up the views and models to have their own sub-folders with something like:

Project lay-out

• static/: static files; served directly by App Engine
  • js/*.js
  • images/*.gif|png|jpg
  • css/*.css
• myapp/: app structure
  • models/*.py
  • views/*.py
  • tests/*.py
  • templates/*.html: templates