Yesterday Google's Twitter-like service, Jaiku was released as open source running on Google Appengine so I decided to take it for a spin. It has a lot of neat parts like XMPP and google contacts integration, but what I'm interested in most is how it implements it's publisher/subscriber model.

I brought the code down from svn and tried to follow the instructions, but I got a "No module named django" error. One of the problems currently with appengine is that you have a limit of 1000 files you can upload. Because of this limit when deploying jaiku you need to zip a bunch of libraries into a zip file and use zipimport. Accordingly you have to prevent the source files from being uploaded because you get an error saying you can't upload more than 1000 files.

The problem there is that the newest (1.1.9) SDK prevents you from loading modules and/or accessing files that are specified in the skip-files directive in your app.yaml. This prevented me from importing django because it's a zipped module.

At first I tried just zipping the files up using the zip_all command in the Makefile (make zip_all) but I still got the same error so I just commented out the relevant parts in app.yaml.

From there it should have worked but I got an error about the pstats module. That just happened to not be installed on my machine so installed python-profiler and Jaiku ran from there.