On this question I solved the problem of querying Google Datastore to retrieve stuff by user (com.google.appengine.api.users.User) like this:
User user = userService.getCurrentUser();
String select_query = "select from " + Greeting.class.getName();
Query query = pm.newQuery(select_query);
query.setFilter("author == paramAuthor");
query.declareParameters("java.lang.String paramAuthor");
greetings = (List<Greeting>) query.execute(user);
The above works fine - but after a bit of messing around I realized this syntax in not very practical as the need to build more complicated queries arises - so I decided to manually build my filters and now I got for example something like the following (where the filter is usually passed in as a string variable but now is built inline for simplicity):
User user = userService.getCurrentUser();
String select_query = "select from " + Greeting.class.getName();
Query query = pm.newQuery(select_query);
query.setFilter("author == '"+ user.getEmail() +"'");
greetings = (List<Greeting>) query.execute();
Obviously this won't work even if this syntax with field = 'value' is supported by JDOQL and it works fine on other fields (String types and Enums). The other strange thing is that looking at the Data viewer in the app-engine dashboard the 'author' field is stored as type User but the value is '[email protected]', and then again when I set it up as parameter (the case above that works fine) I am declaring the parameter as a String then passing down an instance of User (user) which gets serialized with a simple toString() (I guess).
Anyone any idea?