Shortenize -- Very simple backend

This is to support the idea described by TimothyFitz in this Clusterify project. Basically we want to associate short summaries for news/websites, and probably based on their URLs. I came up with the simplest code I could think of to provide the backend service for related functionality, so we can start coding userscripts etc. We may make changes afterwards in the model, as needed, of course.
-- François Savard, 2009.02.23

Update 2009.02.26: I also created a small bookmarklet as a demo of the functionality. See embed.js (with code for bookmarklet in there).

You can see the source for this here: shortenize.py. The other file needed for App Engine, app.yaml, is very straightforward.

Basically there are two basic functionalities: READ and WRITE.

WRITE is the functionality to add summaries. You must be logged in your Google account to submit summaries. To call the API function, you get http://shortenize.appspot.com/write? and pass the following parameters as HTTP GET:

• _url
• _content: the summary, multiline
• _namespace: a namespace (string), if we ever need to have multiple applications or other divisions. May be empty/not provided.
• _jsonp_callback: name of the function to call with the JSON object as a parameter (for cross-domain JSON queries).

READ is the functionality to retrieve summaries stored by WRITEs. No need to be logged in to call this, of course. So you load http://shortenize.appspot.com/read? with the following HTTP GET params:

• _url
• _namespace: the namespace, if necessary.
• _jsonp_callback: name of the function to call with the JSON object as a parameter (for cross-domain JSON queries). This will make the script return a JSON call to that callback, instead of 'OK'.

The response to READ requests, if well-formed, is a JSON array of objects with the following fields:

• key: datastore key for the object, for reference (if we implement votes)
• author: the nickname of the author of this summary
• content: the summary itself
• date: the date of submission
• namespace: the namespace (might be empty)