How Djangae's App Engine Datastore Connector Works

One of my many responsibilities is being the BDFL of the Djangae project. Djangae is a Django application which provides a compatibility layer to allow Django to integrate well with Google App Engine.

The most complex part of the Djangae project is the "datastore connector". This is a Django ORM backend which allows much (but importantly, not all!) of the Django ORM to function using App Engine's non-relational Datastore as the database.

In this post I'll summarize the key tricks we use to make the Django ORM work on the Datastore.