Setting up the local environment

At the time of writing this book, App Engine provides Django version 1.4 and 1.5 as a third-party library for the Python 2.7 runtime environment. Even though it is quite old (Django 1.4 was released on March 2012 and 1.5 was released in February 2013), the 1.4 version is currently the long-term support distribution framework, with security patches and data loss fixes guaranteed until March 2015, and the 1.5 version (thus marked as experimental on App Engine) contains a lot of new features and improvements compared to the 1.4 version. For these reasons, we can safely build our applications using one of the Django packages provided by App Engine without the risk of producing legacy code.

However, if we can afford to drop the official support that Google provides to Django 1.4 and 1.5, we can use the latest version of Django currently available, 1.7, the only difference being that we will have to take care of the deployment of the package on our own because...