Google voice still doesn't release their official API, but some people already did some job so that we can use Google Voice more conveniently.

Chad Smith made the Google Voice Firefox addon, which is a great tool that you can use it with your Google Voice number and send SMS message without laving your browser. Chad also posted a topic to introduce how to place calls or send SMS using Google Voice via HTTP or XML request.

See: http://posttopic.com/topic/google-voice-add-on-development

According to Chad’s article, before Google release the API, to use Google Voice’s features in a standalone program is also possible. pygooglevoice is one of this kinds of open-source projects: http://code.google.com/p/pygooglevoice/ 

Scott Hillman also wrote a script with similar functions to use in command line.

http://everydayscripting.blogspot.com/2009/10/python-custom-google-voice-api.html

I tried to use their library/script in my Google App Engine based web application, and then I met a mess of problems.

Firstly, App Engine supply the URL fetch service API to work with HTTP request. Although you can also make HTTP request using urllib, urllib2 or httplib, but actually, all these kinds of routine call will be redirect to urlfetch API. But URL fetch service has a lot of limitation; it doesn’t handle the Cookies, so that you can't login to Google account in the background before send HTTP request to Google Voice.

Scott did a helper class to handle the Cookies and resolved the login issue.

http://everydayscripting.blogspot.com/2009/08/google-app-engine-cookie-handling-with.html

When I used his URLOpener class to login Google account in my program, I met the exception of "Stripped prohibited headers from URLFetch request: ['Host']". As Google does some restriction in the latest version of App Engine, some HTTP request headers will be recognized as distrustful. So I recommend you to delete the ‘Host’ parameter from headers in Scott’s class. The URLOpener still work normally after comment the “Host” parameter.

Then, I started to replace the HTTP request API in pygooglevoice with Scott’s URLOpener class, and some other problems arose.

pygooglevoice use ConfigParser to store the configuration properties, ConfigParse is not supported by App Engine, so you need to refactor this class. I changed the Conf class to inherit from appengine’s db.Model.

You may meet the encode problem when using pygooglevoice to send SMS message. I fixed the issue by unicode the input text and then encode it to utf-8 standard.

Everything is OK now, you can test the SMS sending feature on my home page: http://cpedia.net/ 

I will continue to work on a new open-source project, integrate pygooglevoice with all the fixes above together, and demonstrate a sample application on appspot.

http://code.google.com/p/googlevoice-gae/

Thanks to G.F.W, my site couldn't be accessed in China mainland for a long time. Before that, I had my DNS CNAME point to one of the available ghs.google.com ip addresses. But unfortunately, all the available ghs IPs are blocked by G.F.W until now.

I can not give up using GAE to build my site and some other applications. "Easy to scale" is the greatest advantage that we can not give away. This advantage can not be matched by some other site/app building solution, such as virtual host.

A reverse proxy is always used for load balancing or caching, but being used as springboard between china clients and google server is only a last resort.

So I bought a VPS server to set up my proxy server using Nginx.

The VPS server bought from burst.net, I chose the $5.95/MONTH linux vps package and paid annually for only $59.50. As the things go, It's well worth the money.
(Tips: Don't pay by credit card with non-US billing address, that's unacceptable. I tried and failed and finally paid by paypal eCheck.)

VPS Software: vePortal™ / OpenVZ™
CPU: 1000MHZ GUARANTEED
Memory: 512MB GUARANTEED
Disk Space: 20GB (RAID BASED CONFIG)
Bandwidth: 1000GB/MONTH
IP Addresses: 2
Management: BASIC MANAGED
DDOS Protection: CISCO™ GUARD
FREE SETUP $5.95/MONTH

And I am also working on a OpenVPN setup under the VPS. Then not only my site/app can "climb over the wall", but also I can access some famous web applications such as twitter and YouTube in China.

cpedialog已经落户到google code了，地址是 http://code.google.com/p/cpedialog/。

如果你想在appengine上架设自己的站点，cpedialog是个不错的开始，尽管我们还没有发布测试版本，你仍然可以通过svn检出最新的代码。
 

# Non-members may check out a read-only working copy anonymously over HTTP.
svn checkout http://cpedialog.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ cpedialog-read-only 
 

我们希望在第一个release时实现一些google service的整合，譬如picasaweb,calendar,docs等。

我们欢迎任何对appengine感兴趣，熟悉python的朋友加入cpedialog项目。有意者请给我发邮件：cpedia@gmail.com

从对python一无所知，到将自己的博客程序（原为php）迁移到google的appengine仅仅用了不到一个星期的时间。

python真的很美，一切java里的经验都可以转移过来，我在实现基于google GqlQuery的分页类的时候几乎全盘借鉴以前实现的一个hibernate分页类。当然为了不重复造轮子，我还是扩展了django的paginator（最新版本的，而非appengine目前0.96的实现，0.96的ObjectPaginator已经不被赞成使用）。

虽然还有很多不完美的地方，尤其google Datastore的诸多限制，譬如数据一次最多只能fetch 1000条，cpu的使用限制，让我在将以前mysql里的数据导过来时费了很大一番周折。不过我会继续完善程序，谁叫我真的喜欢上了appengine和python呢。

Google App Engine SDK 升级到1.1.0了，前几天还在排队的，今天突然发现可以直接用短信认证注册。

简单看了一下文档，app engine还是很诱人的。即使服务是收费了，但是对开发人员来说它的诱惑要远大于虚拟主机。

毕竟运算能力和带宽有了保证，而且google将会继续支持更多api，包括google已有服务（譬如gmail）。我都有准备把博客转到它上面的打算了。