Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team

Gregory Pennington and James Bogosian, Advertising Platform Solutions Team

When inspiration strikes, it's nice to go from concept to reality in the shortest possible amount of time. We're happy to let you know about two new tools that will help you shorten the path on App Engine from conception to clicks.

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team

Gregory Pennington and James Bogosian, Advertising Platform Solutions Team

When inspiration strikes, it's nice to go from concept to reality in the shortest possible amount of time. We're happy to let you know about two new tools that will help you shorten the path on App Engine from conception to clicks.


Zoho Creator


For those used to rapidly developing apps with Zoho Creator, we are happy to announce that Zoho have made it possible to deploy these apps using Google App Engine. Zoho Creator enables you to develop data backed business applications, and once you have developed your app in Creator, simply download the Python code and upload it to Google App Engine.


App Engine Site Creator


App Engine Site Creator is a lightweight content management system with a full GUI for content creation and administration. It provides a hierarchical site structure, an authentication system, user and group level access controls, file attachments and a WYSIWYG interface for editing page HTML.


The resulting managed site is designed to be themed and branded, and the back end Site Creator code was written with readability and extensibility in mind. Check out the code to learn more or visit the project page to learn how to download and deploy your own instance. As always, we welcome your feedback in our Google Group.

We're excited to announce a couple new features and a preview for you today:



  • an App Engine System Status Site that monitors the latency and uptime of various components and provides real-time visibility into their performance

  • a new Quota Details Dashboard, detailing all of the resource quotas that affect your application

  • a sneak peak at our upcoming billing feature, which will enable your app to grow beyond our free quotas!

We're excited to announce a couple new features and a preview for you today:



  • an App Engine System Status Site that monitors the latency and uptime of various components and provides real-time visibility into their performance

  • a new Quota Details Dashboard, detailing all of the resource quotas that affect your application

  • a sneak peak at our upcoming billing feature, which will enable your app to grow beyond our free quotas!


System Status Site






The new System Status Site provides a detailed view into the performance of various App Engine components using some of the same raw monitoring data that our engineering team uses internally. This includes:



  • up-to-the-minute overview of our system status with real-time, unedited data

  • daily overall serving status for each of our APIs, including any outages or downtime

  • detailed historical latency and error-rate graphs for the App Engine Datastore, Images, Mail, Memcache, Serving, URL Fetch, and Users components



In addition to the Downtime Notify Google Group, we'll use this dashboard to announce scheduled downtime and explain any issues that affect App Engine applications. You'll be able to see real data behind any issues that we experience along with explanations from our team.



We'll continue to tune this dashboard to make sure we're providing useful and accurate information about App Engine's uptime. We expect this tool will complement others offered by other companies, such as Hyperic's CloudStatus.



Quota Details Dashboard




For each App Engine application, we now provide a Quota Details Dashboard. This makes it easier to track how much of the free quota your app is using up across bandwidth, CPU, etc. Use it to get detailed information about all of the resource quotas that affect your application.






To use the Quota Details Dashboard, click the "Quota Details" link on the dashboard for any app.



Sneak Preview: Purchasing Additional Resources




As mentioned in the product roadmap, soon you'll be able to buy additional capacity beyond the free quotas. (For reference, we described our expected pricing earlier.) In the mean time, we wanted to give you a brief update on this feature.



You'll be able to buy capacity based on a daily budget for your app, similar to the way AdWords spending works. You'll have fine-grained control over this daily budget so you can apply it across CPU, network bandwidth, disk storage, and email as you see fit. You'll only pay for the resources your app actually uses, not to exceed the budget you set. Here are a couple screenshots from the beta interface:





Of course, we're still working on this feature, so we'll likely make additional changes before releasing it.



We hope you like these new features--please let us know what you think in the discussion group!



Posted by Brett Slatkin, App Engine Team

Posted by Pete Koomen, App Engine Team


This morning, Salesforce.com announced Force.com for Google App Engine, a Python library and test suite for apps running on App Engine that enables developers to easily access the Force.com Web services API. This means that developers can now build apps that manipulate and display data stored on Force.com.

Posted by Pete Koomen, App Engine Team


This morning, Salesforce.com announced Force.com for Google App Engine, a Python library and test suite for apps running on App Engine that enables developers to easily access the Force.com Web services API. This means that developers can now build apps that manipulate and display data stored on Force.com.



We're excited about the breadth of new applications enabled by this integration. To name just a few examples:




  • browser-based enterprise apps that help members of your organization manage contacts and orders

  • large-scale consumer apps that offer personalized experiences to your customers

  • online marketing campaigns that generate leads directly



It's fantastic to see App Engine gaining traction in the world of enterprise software--whether you want to deploy a browser-based tool to members of your organization or a personalized, customer-focused app that scales to millions of users, App Engine's ease of use and scaling power make it an ideal choice for enterprise development. With Force.com for App Engine you can now connect apps with the CRM and custom data you already store on the Force.com platform.



To learn more about Force.com for App Engine, you can peruse the Force.com documentation or simply download the library directly from Google Code. Don't forget to tell us what you think on our Google Group!

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team


As 2008 draws to a close, it's time for the last developer roundup of the year. In the spirit of the season, and inspired by ...
Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team


As 2008 draws to a close, it's time for the last developer roundup of the year. In the spirit of the season, and inspired by Giftag.com, I've put together my App Engine Holiday Wish list:

1. A Geo-located Social Jukebox

Sure I can put together a list of songs I like, find out what movies are now playing by me, and always know where I'm going, but where's the application that lets me list songs for my friends to listen to around San Francisco? I'm really looking forward to this and other ideas being written for App Engine, so in the new year I can let everyone know I love to listen to "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" on the Golden Gate Bridge.

2. More Python

Right now, I can back up my App Engine datastore to a MySQL database, debug my Python applications in firebug, and stay on top of all my twitters with App Engine. But I do love to flex my Python muscles, so I'm hoping more people contribute to our Open Source projects page.

3. A Good Read

While I get a chapter-by-chapter update of the O'Reilly App Engine book, peruse the alpha version of Developing with Google App Engine, and read about App Engine in Action, I still find myself looking for more good reading material. I'd love to see our developers contribute more articles to our documentation, so if you're a Hemingway in the making, let us know and we can show you how to contribute an article.

4. Interesting Conversation

After several App Engine Chat times, and some great discussion in our forum, I just can't get enough. Next year I'm looking forward to some more stimulating conversation with our App Engine developers!
Labels:

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team

Update: This morning we released SDK 1.1.7 due to an issue with the 1.1.6 release. SDK 1.1.7 contains the fix for this issue, as well as the fixes and features listed below.

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team

Update: This morning we released SDK 1.1.7 due to an issue with the 1.1.6 release. SDK 1.1.7 contains the fix for this issue, as well as the fixes and features listed below.


Today we released the 1.1.6 SDK. You can download it on our Google hosting project, and peruse the release notes for more details on the release.


This release contains some notable new features, including several to our datastore:


  • You can now sort and filter on an entity's key

  • You can now delete an entity directly using its key, without fetching the Model object.

  • If you specify a key_name when creating a Model, its key will now be available before you call put()

  • URLFetch calls made in the SDK now have a 5 second timeout, matching production


Also, it contains a number of issue fixes, including the following:


As always, any and all feedback is welcome in the Google Group!

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team

Join fellow Google App Engine developers in Shanghai for Google App Engine Camp on November 22nd starting at 1pm. We'll be meeting at Google's Shanghai office, where you can come to discuss and develop your App Engine projects. We'll kick off the event with a round of lightening talks, after which you can meet other developers, and even get started coding!

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team

Join fellow Google App Engine developers in Shanghai for Google App Engine Camp on November 22nd starting at 1pm. We'll be meeting at Google's Shanghai office, where you can come to discuss and develop your App Engine projects. We'll kick off the event with a round of lightening talks, after which you can meet other developers, and even get started coding!


Food and coffee will be provided, so just bring your ideas and your laptop. Full details and registration form can be found on the website.

Posted by Donal Mountain, App Engine Team

Starting later this year the App Engine team will be getting out of the office for a series of developer visits.


We want to come to your home or office (or wherever you use App Engine), and look over your shoulder so that we can learn first-hand about how you use our product. Our goal is to see how App Engine fits into your development process. We want to learn what's working for you and what's frustrating you.

Posted by Donal Mountain, App Engine Team

Starting later this year the App Engine team will be getting out of the office for a series of developer visits.


We want to come to your home or office (or wherever you use App Engine), and look over your shoulder so that we can learn first-hand about how you use our product. Our goal is to see how App Engine fits into your development process. We want to learn what's working for you and what's frustrating you.


The initial round of visits will be to developers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and then in the new year we will visit developers elsewhere in the US. If you would like to participate, please take a few minutes to complete this sign-up form. That link also contains information about exactly what's involved in the field visit. Developers who we end up visiting will receive $150 compensation. For questions and updates check the App Engine discussion group.


We look forward to meeting as many of you as possible!


Please join us in November for a Google App Engine Hackathon in Atlanta and Ann Arbor. Not only can you learn more about App Engine, but you can also share ideas with local developers, look for partners on your latest project, get support, brainstorm, and network.


Please join us in November for a Google App Engine Hackathon in Atlanta and Ann Arbor. Not only can you learn more about App Engine, but you can also share ideas with local developers, look for partners on your latest project, get support, brainstorm, and network.




Learn about Google App Engine

There will be talks on the major features of Google App Engine at different points throughout the day. We will run through developing an app with the SDK and show how to deploy and manage applications on Google App Engine. Google App Engine and Python enthusiasts from the community will be on hand to help and to answer questions throughout the day.



Build With Us, or Build Your Own

You are welcome to bring along anything you can prepare ahead of time (sketches, designs, web page mock ups, etc.) and use the time and information provided to develop your idea into a working application, then share it with the world. Or, you can code along with us in building a Google App Engine application from start to finish.



What Do I Need?

There will be power, refreshments and Python enthusiasts to help you learn to use Google App Engine and write your application. Just bring your laptops, ideas and enthusiasm to complete the mix.



When and Where?


The Atlanta hackathon will take place Saturday November 15, 2008 from 10AM-6PM at Google Atlanta in Millennium in Midtown, 10 10th Street NE, Suite 600, Atlanta, GA 30309 (map) 



Sign up now for the Atlanta hackathon.







The Ann Arbor hackathon will take place Monday November 17, 2008 from 10AM-6PM at Google Ann Arbor in 201 S. Division St., Ann Arbor, MI 48104 (map) 



Sign up now for the Ann Arbor hackathon. 





Hosted By:


Harpal Gujral (Atlanta)


Matt Simmons (Ann Arbor)




Posted by Amanda Surya, Google App Engine Team

Posted by Paul McDonald, App Engine Team



Over the past few months we've heard some amazing stories detailing
just how easy it is to create scalable web applications on App Engine.
Posted by Paul McDonald, App Engine Team



Over the past few months we've heard some amazing stories detailing
just how easy it is to create scalable web applications on App Engine. We've
invited a few developers to participate in some case study videos and
tell you more about their experience with App Engine.



BuddyPoke!
BuddyPoke! is an OpenSocial app running on
MySpace, Orkut, and Hi5. It has scaled to nearly 30M daily
pageviews on App Engine.

"App
Engine has been a godsend in terms of our scalability...we saw a 8x
jump in installs overnight and we are now serving 12 million users!" -
Dave Westwood, BuddyPoke!












Pixverse (PixChat)
PixChat, recently acquired by Hi5, lets you chat with friends
across the web within your Hi5 profile page. 



"Running our app on App Engine was really easy...the whole porting effort took only 3 hours." - Charles Ying, Pixverse











Hyperic (CloudStatus)

CloudStatus monitors the health and performance of major cloud
computing platforms like App Engine and Amazon Web Services.











These are but three examples of the many applications that have
been developed on App Engine.  Are you interested in sharing your
experience?  If so we'd love to hear from you, tell us your story in our developer forum.

Posted by Jens Scheffler, Apps Labs Team



When we find tools that work well for us at Google, we like to share them with our customers. That's what we're doing today as we launch Labs for Google Apps, a place for us to deliver cool new experimental features to our Google Apps enterprise users. The applications we're launching today into Labs for Google Apps are:

Posted by Jens Scheffler, Apps Labs Team



When we find tools that work well for us at Google, we like to share them with our customers. That's what we're doing today as we launch Labs for Google Apps, a place for us to deliver cool new experimental features to our Google Apps enterprise users. The applications we're launching today into Labs for Google Apps are:



  • Google Moderator: Take Q&A to a whole new level -- manage feedback from the smallest video conference to the largest all-hands company meeting.

  • Google Code Review: Collaborate with others to catch bugs in software changes before you check them in.

  • Google Short Links: Create easy-to-remember links for both your internal and external web pages.


Here's a peek under the hood of these new Labs tools.




Since Google App Engine launched in April, Googlers have been using it to build and port a number of useful applications--some of which are the apps we're launching today into Google Labs.



The challenge in building these features was to design a system to centrally deploy a single application to many (many!) Google Apps customers, each on a separate domain. We needed to create data sandboxes for each customer within the app. We needed to add domain administrator controls. We needed to make it safe and easy to use and we needed big-time scalability. That's why we built these new applications on App Engine -- it provided us with a container that combined scalability and rapid development with our experience building powerful applications that Google users love.



Here at Google, we're very serious about keeping user data safe. We designed safety mechanisms to enforce the separation of namespaces in the datastore so that data remains secure and private on each domain. We also added integration with the Google Apps control panel for customer-level administrative controls.



Today's launch is just the beginning, and we're going to introduce more useful apps into the Labs for Google Apps over time. We also intend to eventually open up this platform to all App Engine developers, so that new and existing software vendors can build easy-to-consume software for the million-plus businesses using Google Apps today.



Want to be a part of it? Check out the Solutions Marketplace and you can pick and choose which Labs for Google Apps features you want for your domain. We've put feedback links in too so you can let us know what's good and what's not--the good stuff may make it into Google Apps one day.


Happy experimenting!

Posted by Paul McDonald, App Engine Team



We now have App Engine T-Shirts for sale in the Google Store.
Posted by Paul McDonald, App Engine Team



We now have App Engine T-Shirts for sale in the Google Store.


















Go get your shirt and show us how you rock it!

Posted by the App Engine Team

Many of you have expressed interest in learning about what's coming next for Google App Engine, and although we've often talked about features we plan on supporting, we've decided to publish this roadmap along with our documentation. Without further ado, here's what we've got coming up in the next 2 quarters:

Posted by the App Engine Team

Many of you have expressed interest in learning about what's coming next for Google App Engine, and although we've often talked about features we plan on supporting, we've decided to publish this roadmap along with our documentation. Without further ado, here's what we've got coming up in the next 2 quarters:


  • Service for storing and serving large files

  • Datastore import and export utility for large-scale databases

  • Billing: developers can pay for more resource usage

  • Support for a new runtime language

  • Uptime monitoring site



At Google we've historically avoided giving release dates for our products because we know that software development is incredibly hard to predict. Thus, it should be noted that while we're working hard on these features, development schedules do slip at times, and the dates below may change. We'll do our best to update this roadmap as our engineers continue development.


For reference, since our release in April, we've already added:




Remember, you can always let us know what you think on our Google Group!

Labels:

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team

Have something to ask the App Engine team? Spending time scratching your head on a problem and want to ask someone who spends his or her days and nights working with App Engine? Spend all of your time on IRC anyway?

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team

Have something to ask the App Engine team? Spending time scratching your head on a problem and want to ask someone who spends his or her days and nights working with App Engine? Spend all of your time on IRC anyway?


Starting this week, the App Engine developer relations team will be experimenting with holding bi-monthly 1 hour developer chat sessions on the #appengine IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. Look here for a helpful list of IRC clients. We welcome all App Engine questions, and will try to answer as many as we can get through in the hour. We'll be posting the complete chat sessions on the group for those not able to make the scheduled chat times.


The first chat session will be this Wednesday at 9AM PDT. In general, we are planning on holding the sessions the first and third Wednesday of the month, alternating between day and evening. We're test-driving this program, so the days and times may change.


Here are the currently scheduled dates and times:


  • Wednesday, October 22, 9am-10am PDT

  • Wednesday, November 5, 7pm-8pm PST

  • Wednesday, November 19, 9am-10am PST

  • Wednesday, December 3, 7pm-8pm PST

  • Wednesday, December 17, 9am-10am PST



We look forward to chatting with you! And, remember, you can always post your questions to our Google Group, which we read and respond to regularly.


One of the most frequently requested features for App Engine has been HTTPS serving capabilities. Today we're excited to announce that App Engine now supports incoming HTTPS connections using a certificate valid for all appspot.com URLs. Here's how it works:


One of the most frequently requested features for App Engine has been HTTPS serving capabilities. Today we're excited to announce that App Engine now supports incoming HTTPS connections using a certificate valid for all appspot.com URLs. Here's how it works:



  • app.yaml files now support a new handler attribute, called "secure":


    - url: /accounts/.*
      script: admin.py
      login: admin
      secure: always


    This attribute can be set to either always, optional, or never (default), and determines the behavior of the handler for HTTP and HTTPS requests. See our documentation for more details.



  • HTTPS requests have their own bandwidth quotas, but also count toward your total bandwidth quotas. You can monitor these quotas on your Admin Console Dashboard.



You may be wondering why we're only supporting appspot.com right now, and not arbitrary Google Apps domains. This has to do with fundamental limitations in the SSL protocol. We're currently investigating workarounds for this using e.g. SNI, which provides a viable solution for newer browsers--we'll keep you posted!



As always, please tell us what you think in our Google Group, and let us know what else you'd like to see!



Posted by Pete Koomen, App Engine Team

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team

Today we've released some new features in our Admin Console to make it easier for you to manage your application.


Admin Logs: This new feature displays a record of all actions committed by the application's admins. Click on 'Admin Logs' under the 'Administration' section of the navigation bar. You can search for app configuration, version management, developer administration, and datastore changes. Just choose the desired event from the drop down and click 'Display'!

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team

Today we've released some new features in our Admin Console to make it easier for you to manage your application.


Admin Logs: This new feature displays a record of all actions committed by the application's admins. Click on 'Admin Logs' under the 'Administration' section of the navigation bar. You can search for app configuration, version management, developer administration, and datastore changes. Just choose the desired event from the drop down and click 'Display'!



Regex Filtering in Logs: Looking for all requests that throw a certain error? Want information on all requests containing specific query arguments? Use the new regex filter on the logs page of your admin console to search for requests that contain text matching a given regular expression. Note: at most 10,000 log records are searched per request; use the Next link to search further back. The time stamp of the last record searched (not the last record matched!) is displayed to help you decide whether to search further back. If the end of the logs is reached, the Next link is not shown.



Log URLs can now be bookmarked: The logs URLs in the admin console now include an offset argument so that you can bookmark interesting pages, and send them to other admins. This also enables usage of the 'back' button on your logs pages.


We hope these changes will make it easier for you to manage your app and troubleshoot any issues you may have.

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team

It's been a few weeks, but it's time again to roll up all the goings-on in the App Engine community.



First, if you haven't read it already, you should check out Andi Albrecht's article 'Running App Engine Applications on Django'. He wrote an article discussing his project, gae2django, which was built to run App Engine Django apps on any hosting system that supports Django.

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team

It's been a few weeks, but it's time again to roll up all the goings-on in the App Engine community.



First, if you haven't read it already, you should check out Andi Albrecht's article 'Running App Engine Applications on Django'. He wrote an article discussing his project, gae2django, which was built to run App Engine Django apps on any hosting system that supports Django.



We've also been very excited to see some great new applications built on App Engine. For those of us concerned about being green, PrintWhatYouLike.com offers you a way to print only parts of a website you need. If you want some food for thought everyday along with your breakfast, check out Puzzazz, which gives you a new puzzle every day to solve. And if you are feeling artistic, visit picjuice.com to edit your photos online.



Several teams at Google have even released their own apps using App Engine, including tools for Chromium coders, inquisitive types, or anyone interested in changing the world.



Finally, we are happy to announce a new program for those of you wishing to hold App Engine hackathons in your hometown, Hackathon-in-a-Box.



Takashi Matsuo was nice enough to pilot our Hackathon-in-a-Box program in Japan at the end of September, and it was a great success. Twenty-five App Engine developers attended the event, which was held at the Google office in Tokyo. They reviewed a translation of Building Scalable Web Applications that Takashi prepared, and then got to coding their own applications. See below for a slide show of the event.





If you're interested in holding your own Hackathon-in-a-Box, please read the program guidelines on our Sites page and then get in touch with us by emailing admins@hackathoninabox.com to get started!



If you have any questions or discussion topics, checkout our group!

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team

Today is the release of the 1.1.5 SDK, which, as always, is available for download on our Google hosting project. The release notes contain all of the nitty gritty details. Here's a summary:

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team

Today is the release of the 1.1.5 SDK, which, as always, is available for download on our Google hosting project. The release notes contain all of the nitty gritty details. Here's a summary:



For this release, we've added these features:



The SDK also contains the following issue fixes:



It's also worth noting we released the 1.1.4 SDK on Friday, September 26, fixing two Windows SDK bugs: one issue with escaping in the app.yaml file, and another fixing issues with the datastore viewer on the SDK.



We'd love to hear your feedback on the Google group!

Posted by Taliver Heath, Platform Engineer

At Google, we host a large number of "tech talks". These talks cover a wide rage of Computer Science topics like research in machine learning and methods for ranking images based on text queries. I've enjoyed attending these tech talks, but as the number of attendees has grown over time, the question-and-answer part of the talks hasn't been able to scale. There was never enough time for all the questions, and it wasn't clear that the best questions were the ones actually getting asked. And since many of these talks were led by offices outside of Mountain View, it became harder for distributed audiences to participate.

Posted by Taliver Heath, Platform Engineer

At Google, we host a large number of "tech talks". These talks cover a wide rage of Computer Science topics like research in machine learning and methods for ranking images based on text queries. I've enjoyed attending these tech talks, but as the number of attendees has grown over time, the question-and-answer part of the talks hasn't been able to scale. There was never enough time for all the questions, and it wasn't clear that the best questions were the ones actually getting asked. And since many of these talks were led by offices outside of Mountain View, it became harder for distributed audiences to participate.



To help with this, I designed a tool in my 20% time that would allow anyone attending a tech talk to submit a question, and then give other participants a way to vote on whether or not that question should be asked. This way, the most popular and relevant questions would rise to the top so that the presenter or the moderator of an event could run the discussion more efficiently and in a transparent manner. The tool, which we internally called "Dory" after our favorite question-asking fish in Finding Nemo, quickly grew to other parts of Google including our weekly all-hands company meeting, as well as for our series of talks led by political candidates or distinguished authors.



Several of our colleagues and visitors to Google have asked if we could make it available externally for any kind of talk, presentation and/or event. Conveniently, Google App Engine launched in April and made it easy for us to do this! As a result, we're pleased to release this tool, now called Google Moderator, on Google App Engine. Google Moderator is available now and is free to use. To get started go to moderator.appspot.com and sign in to your Google Account.

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team

Many people have been asking for clarification on their application's CPU usage, and today we are happy to announce the release of a new Admin Console. These improvements are designed to give better insight in to your application's resource usage.

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team

Many people have been asking for clarification on their application's CPU usage, and today we are happy to announce the release of a new Admin Console. These improvements are designed to give better insight in to your application's resource usage.


Your application's dashboard now displays the average amount of CPU consumed for each of your handlers, as well as the percentage of CPU of that handler with respect to your application:


For information on how these values are calculated, see our FAQ.


Additionally, in your logs you can find the amount of CPU consumed for each request:



Remember, you can download all of your logs from the Admin Console. And with the CPU usage stats, you can profile how your app performs and work to optimize requests that consume the most resources. By minimizing the work done on each request you can reduce your application latency and rest easy knowing your app will scale easily! Feel free to discuss in our Google Group!

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team

Yesterday we released the latest SDK, and you can read all about it in the release notes.



Notable new features in this SDK are:

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team

Yesterday we released the latest SDK, and you can read all about it in the release notes.



Notable new features in this SDK are:


  • Support for zipimport and a new module, zipserve, which serves static files from a zip archive. These allow you to work past the 1000-file app deployment limit.

  • The development console now includes a memcache viewer (you can use this by accessing http://localhost:8080/_ah/admin while your app is running on the SDK).

  • URLFetch now allows users to disable automatically following HTTP redirects.

  • We now allow composite indexes with repeated properties.




It also includes the following issue fixes:

  • It correctly escapes path separators in static_dir path on windows.

  • Sending email messages with unicode content now works.

  • Fixed db.run_in_transaction so that it doesn't allow inserting two (or more) new root entities in a single transaction.



    • The new SDK is available for download, and as always, we welcome your feedback on the group!


    Two weeks ago, there were two App Engine events in Seattle, and I have to say, Seattle is rocking cloud computing.



    The first event was at StartPad, a coworking facility where lots of great start-ups are based. Yours truly gave a presentation, interrupted quite frequently by excellent questions, to a crowd of about 40 people. There were lots of people interested in cloud computing, both Google App Engine and Amazon's AWS. After all, who wants to manage their own data center?


    Two weeks ago, there were two App Engine events in Seattle, and I have to say, Seattle is rocking cloud computing.



    The first event was at StartPad, a coworking facility where lots of great start-ups are based. Yours truly gave a presentation, interrupted quite frequently by excellent questions, to a crowd of about 40 people. There were lots of people interested in cloud computing, both Google App Engine and Amazon's AWS. After all, who wants to manage their own data center?



    The second event was Google's App Engine Hack-a-thon, where about 45 people came and hacked away on their App Engine applications. It was great fun. Here are just some of the apps that people wrote and demoed during the event:



    StumbleRead - a Friend Feed aggregator.

    After Market Accounts - Allows you to resell website registrations.

    Media Library - Allows you to store and organize your iTunes library information.

    PublicDominion - A wiki that generates new web pages automatically from user-added tags.

    Plain Ticket - A message queue for Google App Engine applications.









    Thanks Seattle, for your hospitality.


    Posted by Mano Marks, Google App Engine Team

    Posted by Amanda Surya, Google App Engine Team




    We're happy to announce Google App Engine hack-a-thon in Tokyo, Japan. This hack-a-thon is mainly for Japanese speaking people, but if you can only speak English, no problem, you are also welcome to attend.

    Posted by Amanda Surya, Google App Engine Team




    We're happy to announce Google App Engine hack-a-thon in Tokyo, Japan. This hack-a-thon is mainly for Japanese speaking people, but if you can only speak English, no problem, you are also welcome to attend.



    Build With Us, or Build Your Own

    Throughout the day, we will be building a complete App Engine application, and sharing the code with you so you can code along with us. If, on the other hand, you already have a great idea for what to build, bring that idea along. Even better, prepare sketches, designs, web page mock-ups, etc. ahead of time, and use the hackathon to develop your idea into a working application that you can share with the world.

    At the end of the day, we'll invite you to share your App Engine applications with the group.



    What Do I Need?

    We will provide facilities, power, refreshments and experts to help you learn to use Google App Engine and write your application. Just bring your laptops, ideas and enthusiasm to complete the mix.



    When and Where?

    The Tokyo hack-a-thon will take place Saturday September 20, 2008 from 10AM-6PM(JST +900). It will be held in Google's Tokyo Office.



    Space is limited so Sign Up now.



    Hosted by:

    Takashi Matsuo, Naoki Ishihara

    Do you have a really great code snippet you'd love to share with App Engine developers? Have you figured out how to program a small task for your app and want to tell the world? Share your elite coding skills with the world by posting your recipe to our Google App Engine Cookbook. There's no such thing as too many cooks in this kitchen!

    Do you have a really great code snippet you'd love to share with App Engine developers? Have you figured out how to program a small task for your app and want to tell the world? Share your elite coding skills with the world by posting your recipe to our Google App Engine Cookbook. There's no such thing as too many cooks in this kitchen!



    The App Engine Cookbook allows you to share, rate, and comment on App Engine recipes and was written by Google Engineer Amaltas Bohra. We've added some of our favorites, now we can't wait to see what's cookin' in the App Engine developer community!



    Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team

    We've updated other parts of the system before, so it's time for the datastore to ante up with its own improvements. There may not be any big surprises, but we still hope you'll enjoy the new features we've included!

    We've updated other parts of the system before, so it's time for the datastore to ante up with its own improvements. There may not be any big surprises, but we still hope you'll enjoy the new features we've included!

    First up is batch writes. You can now include entities in different entity groups in a single db.put() or db.delete() call. Entity modifications are only atomic within each entity group, but a single call that spans entity groups will be more efficient than a call for each group, which was required before.

    Also, in our next upcoming release, indexes with a single repeated property will be supported. For example:

    Kind: Post
     properties:
     - name: tag
     - name: tag

    These indexes can be useful in a few different cases; see Queries and Indexes for more discussion.

    As usual, be sure to update your SDK and check the release notes for a full list of changes. If you have feedback or questions, feel free to mention them on the group!

    Posted by Ryan Barrett, App Engine Team

    Labels:

    This morning Hyperic released support for Google App Engine monitoring on CloudStatus, Hyperic's
    web-based performance monitoring application. CloudStatus gives you an
    independent, real-time view into the health and performance of App ...
    This morning Hyperic released support for Google App Engine monitoring on CloudStatus, Hyperic's
    web-based performance monitoring application. CloudStatus gives you an
    independent, real-time view into the health and performance of App
    Engine.




    We're excited about what the CloudStatus team has put together, and look forward to seeing other 3rd party tools and services for App Engine developers.


    So go check out CloudStatus and let them know
    what you think, or discuss right here on our Google Group.



     Posted by Paul McDonald, App Engine Team

    Posted by Jeff Scudder, Google App Engine Team



    One of my favorite things about the SDK is the fact that it works offline. When I'm without Internet access on a train, bus, or plane, I can still develop and test my application. I usually work with my browser open, one tab pointed squarely at localhost:8080 and another open to the App Engine documentation. Until recently, the documentation presented a bit of a challenge when I was without network connectivity. But now, we've released the App Engine documentation as a downloadable zip file.

    Posted by Jeff Scudder, Google App Engine Team



    One of my favorite things about the SDK is the fact that it works offline. When I'm without Internet access on a train, bus, or plane, I can still develop and test my application. I usually work with my browser open, one tab pointed squarely at localhost:8080 and another open to the App Engine documentation. Until recently, the documentation presented a bit of a challenge when I was without network connectivity. But now, we've released the App Engine documentation as a downloadable zip file.



    On a related note, our documentation is now licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License (except as otherwise noted). For full details on licensing see http://code.google.com/policies.html. As Dan Sanderson explains on the discussion group,



    "These licenses permit you to re-distribute the documentation, and to 
    distribute derivative works.  For example, you can translate the 
    documentation into another language, and distribute the translation. 
    You can also convert the documentation to a different format (such as 
    PDF), and distribute the new format. "


    We're also planning to bundle the documentation with future versions of the SDK.

    Posted by Marzia Niccolai, Google App Engine Team



    Please join us on August 28th for a Google App Engine Hack-a-thon in the Emerald City.

    Posted by Marzia Niccolai, Google App Engine Team



    Please join us on August 28th for a Google App Engine Hack-a-thon in the Emerald City.



    Learn about Google App Engine

    The events will include training on the major features of Google App Engine, including data modeling, the App Engine APIs, some aspects of Django, and how to mashup App Engine with other web services. Google Engineers will be on hand to help and to answer questions throughout the day.


    For a better idea of what goes on at our hack-a-thons, see our previous posts about the New York, San Francisco, and Chicago hack-a-thons.



    Build With Us, or Build Your Own

    Throughout the day, we will be building a complete App Engine application, and sharing the code with you so you can code along with us. If, on the other hand, you already have a great idea for what to build, bring that idea along. If you already have a great idea for what to build, bring it along and go for it! Even better, prepare sketches, designs, web page mock-ups, etc. ahead of time, and use the hack-a-thon to develop your idea into a working application that you can share with the world.


    At the end of the day, we'll invite you to share your App Engine applications with the group.



    What Do I Need?

    We will provide facilities, power, refreshments and experts to help you learn to use Google App Engine and write your application. Just bring your laptops, ideas and enthusiasm to complete the mix.



    When and Where?

    The Seattle hack-a-thon will take place Thursday August 28, 2008 from 10AM-6PM. It will be held in Google's Seattle Office at 651 N. 34th St.



    Space is limited so Sign Up now.

    Posted by Marzia Niccolai, Google App Engine Team



    I've returned from the App Engine hack-a-thon in Chicago a Superfan of
    the App Engine community. We had lots of fun meeting App Engine developers, but why let me tell you about it? A couple of attendees wrote great summaries of the day: A Ruby on Rails developer giving Python a whirl, and a developer who worked on testing with App Engine. We saw people working on iPhone apps, OpenSocial and App Engine, and even a chat application! See the pictures below:

    Posted by Marzia Niccolai, Google App Engine Team



    I've returned from the App Engine hack-a-thon in Chicago a Superfan of
    the App Engine community. We had lots of fun meeting App Engine developers, but why let me tell you about it? A couple of attendees wrote great summaries of the day: A Ruby on Rails developer giving Python a whirl, and a developer who worked on testing with App Engine. We saw people working on iPhone apps, OpenSocial and App Engine, and even a chat application! See the pictures below:





    While I was away I kept up with all the App Engine goings on with a little help from a spy, and it's nice to know that I can exclaim my whereabouts while I'm gone using Harper Reed's and Aaron Salmon's excellent app!



    Many developers are finding PyDev + Eclipse a great way to develop on App
    Engine, and IBM's developerWorks has a great article on creating mashups doing just that.



    Submissions for our Open Source page continue apace, with the newest contributions for fans of REST, microblogging, and reCAPTCHAs.



    Enjoy the heat!

    Labels:

    We're happy to announce we've released some small updates to Google App Engine. Among the more significant changes:
    • More apps: Want to create more than 3 applications with your App Engine account? Now you can now create up to 10!
    • Time windows for Dashboard graphs: Zoom in on the data in your dashboard to get a more accurate picture of whats going on. You can zoom in to see graphs for the last 24, 12, and 6 hour periods.
    • Logs export: You can now use appcfg.py to download your application's logs in plaintext format. Use appcfg.py --help for more information on how to download your logs.
    • Send email as logged in user: If you're using the users API, you can now send email from the email address of the currently-logged-in user.
    We're happy to announce we've released some small updates to Google App Engine. Among the more significant changes:
    • More apps: Want to create more than 3 applications with your App Engine account? Now you can now create up to 10!
    • Time windows for Dashboard graphs: Zoom in on the data in your dashboard to get a more accurate picture of whats going on. You can zoom in to see graphs for the last 24, 12, and 6 hour periods.
    • Logs export: You can now use appcfg.py to download your application's logs in plaintext format. Use appcfg.py --help for more information on how to download your logs.
    • Send email as logged in user: If you're using the users API, you can now send email from the email address of the currently-logged-in user.
    Be sure to update your SDK and check the release notes for a full list of changes. Have more changes you'd like to see with App Engine? Let us know in our Google Group!



    Posted by Paul McDonald, App Engine Team

    Google Code Jam is a coding competition in which professional and student programmers are asked to solve complex algorithmic challenges in a limited amount of time. The contest is all-inclusive: Google Code Jam lets you program in the coding language and development environment of your choice. The Top 500 participants will advance to onsite competitions at a local Google office to compete against those in their region (Asia Pacific; Europe, Middle East and Africa; and the Americas). The Top 100 will participate in the final round at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California.
    Google Code Jam is a coding competition in which professional and student programmers are asked to solve complex algorithmic challenges in a limited amount of time. The contest is all-inclusive: Google Code Jam lets you program in the coding language and development environment of your choice. The Top 500 participants will advance to onsite competitions at a local Google office to compete against those in their region (Asia Pacific; Europe, Middle East and Africa; and the Americas). The Top 100 will participate in the final round at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California.


    The application that runs the competition is built on App Engine. It was developed by a few Google engineers in their 20% time and is currently serving about 200 requests per second.


    If you are interested in participating you still have a few hours to register. Go to the Code Jam site and check out the live scoreboard!


    Posted byPaul McDonald, App Engine Team

    Posted by Marzia Niccolai, Google App Engine Team



    Having spent the past two weeks tracking a hamster across America, creating collaborative pictures, and planning plenty of parties, I think it's time to get together another community update.

    Posted by Marzia Niccolai, Google App Engine Team



    Having spent the past two weeks tracking a hamster across America, creating collaborative pictures, and planning plenty of parties, I think it's time to get together another community update.



    We were excited to find that one of our developers has started tracking App Engine performance, and hope to see more along these lines in the future. Developers continue to contribute information relating to the bulk loader, including an article that discusses UTF-8 and HandleEntity. And finally, Adobe AIR and Flex developers might be interested in this article about creating a photo application on Google App Engine.



    Those of you who aren't content to just read may wish to get your hands dirty with some Open Source App Engine code. We've had 10 more additions to our Open Source project page, including projects that will interest all you Scrabble players, radio listeners, and RESTful developers.



    Lastly, the forum discussion continues to keep pace, with topics that include IP geocoding, domain configuration, and continued discussion about the cap on indexed properties for an entity.



    Keep letting us know what you've been up to!

    Labels:

    Posted by Marzia Niccolai, Google App Engine Team



    Please join us on July 31st for a Google App Engine Hack-a-thon in the Windy City.

    Posted by Marzia Niccolai, Google App Engine Team



    Please join us on July 31st for a Google App Engine Hack-a-thon in the Windy City.



    Learn about Google App Engine

    The events will include training on the major features of Google App Engine, including data modeling, the App Engine APIs, some aspects of Django, and how to mashup App Engine with other web services. Google Engineers and Product Managers will be on hand to help and to answer questions throughout the day.


    For a better idea of what goes on at our hack-a-thons, see our previous posts about the New York and San Francisco hack-a-thons.



    Build With Us, or Build Your Own

    Throughout the day, we will be building a complete App Engine application, and sharing the code with you so you can code along with us. If, on the other hand, you already have a great idea for what to build, bring that idea along. Even better, bring along anything you can prepare ahead of time (sketches, designs, web page mock ups, etc.) and use the time and information provided to develop your idea into a working application, then share it with the world.


    At the end of the day, we'll invite you to share your App Engine applications with the group.



    What Do I Need?

    We will provide facilities, power, food and refreshments and experts to help you learn to use Google App Engine and write your application. Just bring your laptops, ideas and enthusiasm to complete the mix.



    When and Where?

    The Chicago hack-a-thon will take place Thursday July 31st, 2008 from 10AM-6PM. It will be held in Google's Chicago Office at 20 W. Kinzie St.



    Space is limited so Sign Up now.

    Posted by Marzia Niccolai, Google App Engine Team



    Over the past two months we've seen the App Engine community do some exciting things. To highlight community participation, we'll be posting regular App Engine community updates.

    Posted by Marzia Niccolai, Google App Engine Team



    Over the past two months we've seen the App Engine community do some exciting things. To highlight community participation, we'll be posting regular App Engine community updates.



    Applications

    Below are some of the more popular ones we've seen:


    • Wordle - Create word clouds for user provided text

    • Guess-a-Sketch - Fans of Pictionary will love this sketching-guessing game!

    • BuddyPoke - An OpenSocial application for interacting with your friends




    Developer Articles

    Many developers have written useful articles tutorials about App Engine. This week, we published our first externally written article on the App Engine developer pages Configuring Eclipse on Windows to Use With Google App Engine. Below are some other contributions we've found out there on the world wide web:




    Open Source Projects

    Recently, we invited developers to list their Open Source projects on our group's pages. So far, we have 14 projects - these range from App Engine utility libraries, web frameworks, Open Source applications, and even an HTTP implementation of Map Reduce. Please continue to let us know what you are working on!



    App Engine Group

    Lastly, discussion continues to thrive on our Google group. Recently popular threads include discussions on full text search, session management, downloading apps, and executing common functionality before serving a request.

    Labels:

    Posted by Pete Koomen, Google App Engine Team



    On May 28th and 29th the Google Developer Team hosted Google I/O, a developer gathering in San Francisco. For anyone who wasn't able to join us in person, you can now now catch videos of more than 70 talks, along with slides from each of the presentations, online. Among these are some great sessions from members of the Google App Engine Engineering team:

    Posted by Pete Koomen, Google App Engine Team



    On May 28th and 29th the Google Developer Team hosted Google I/O, a developer gathering in San Francisco. For anyone who wasn't able to join us in person, you can now now catch videos of more than 70 talks, along with slides from each of the presentations, online. Among these are some great sessions from members of the Google App Engine Engineering team:





    There are also a lot of interesting talks on Android, Gears, AJAX Search API, Gadgets, GData, OpenSocial, and many other Google Developer products. Feel free to discuss in our group!

    Posted by Paul McDonald, App Engine Team



    When we launched Google App Engine to 10,000 developers in early April, we were looking for feedback from the community. Since then, even though we've since expanded to 75,000 developers, the request we've heard most often has been to open up the preview release and give more people the chance to use it to deploy their apps to Google's scalable infrastructure.
    Posted by Paul McDonald, App Engine Team



    When we launched Google App Engine to 10,000 developers in early April, we were looking for feedback from the community. Since then, even though we've since expanded to 75,000 developers, the request we've heard most often has been to open up the preview release and give more people the chance to use it to deploy their apps to Google's scalable infrastructure. With more than 80,000 of you still waiting to use App Engine we're especially pleased today to announce that we are opening the flood gates--now anyone who wants to use App Engine can give it a try! So, if you haven't already, head over to our Admin Console and create your first application. Note: you'll need to verify your account with a mobile phone before doing so.



    App Engine will always be free to get started, and we plan on enabling developers to purchase more computing resources sometime this year. Although we're not ready to offer this ability now, we've been asked by many developers to provide some insight into how we'll be pricing App Engine usage for applications that have exceeded the free quota of 500 MB of storage and around 5M pageviews per month. We'd like to be transparent about this, and have announced today that developers can expect to pay:


    • $0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour
    • $0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage
    • $0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth
    • $0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth
    Likewise in response to your feedback we are also providing 2 new APIs, the image manipulation API and the Memcache API.



    The image manipulation API enables developers to resize, rotate, flip, crop and enhance images using the same infrastructure used in Picasa Web Albums. With the images API you can perform common image related tasks like thumbnailing images via a simple interface. For more information about the images API, please see our documentation.



    The Memcache API is a high-performance caching layer designed to make page rendering faster by reducing datastore queries and improving the performance of your application. The Memcache API was written by Brad Fitzpatrick, the same developer who created memcached, a caching layer that is used in some of the world's most popular web applications, and is compatible with memcached implementations. Please see our documentation for more information about the Memcache API.



    These features and improvements were motivated by your feedback and participation in our development process. We're working hard to respond to all of your requests so please continue to share them with us!
    Labels:

    Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team



    On Friday, May 16th, we had our second Google App Engine Hack-a-thon at the Google offices in San Francisco. For 12 hours, developers coded, talked with the Google App Engine engineering team and each other, and filled up on Google snacks.
    Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team



    On Friday, May 16th, we had our second Google App Engine Hack-a-thon at the Google offices in San Francisco. For 12 hours, developers coded, talked with the Google App Engine engineering team and each other, and filled up on Google snacks.




    At the end of the day we had some great results:



    Check out some pictures of the Hack-a-thon:







    If you still haven't got a chance to meet the App Engine developers and build some apps with other App Engine developers, we will be holding some codelab sessions at Google I/O, our annual developer event on May 28th and 29th.

    Posted by John Skidgel, Senior Interaction Designer


    While I was writing scenario applications to test Google App Engine, I had the following idea: If BBEdit, Dreamweaver, CSSEdit, and TextMate were at a party, what kind of application would be welcomed to help with App Engine development? As silly as this sounds, it led me to think more about workflow. I used:

    Posted by John Skidgel, Senior Interaction Designer


    While I was writing scenario applications to test Google App Engine, I had the following idea: If BBEdit, Dreamweaver, CSSEdit, and TextMate were at a party, what kind of application would be welcomed to help with App Engine development? As silly as this sounds, it led me to think more about workflow. I used:




    • a few applications for Python, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.

    • the command line to run applications and to view logs.

    • a browser to test locally and to access the local developer console.

    • the command line to deploy the application.

    • a browser to view a live application's dashboard.




    I began to think about how unfriendly command line interfaces can be, and how much repetitive typing I had been doing to test and deploy applications. With that said, I worked with John Grabowski of the Google Mac team and Brett Slatkin, an engineer on App Engine, on a 20% project to make Google App Engine Launcher for Mac OS X.




    Now, App Engine Launcher is not a replacement for your code editor or your IDE. It improves your App Engine development experience by managing a list of your applications. With a few clicks you can run, browse, deploy, and view logs for your applications. It also has some added sugar thrown in like drag and drop, integration with your editor, and quick links to the local developer console and the live application dashboard.




    Download it now. If it's missing a feature that you'd like to see (like scripting, a Windows or Linux version, human-level AI ;), let us know in the Discussion Group.



    Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team





    Yesterday, Google App Engine held our first ever hack-a-thon at the Google Office in New York City. We had a great turn out of App Engine developers. Some programmed along with us, building a wiki, and some developers brought along their own ideas and spent the day building some awesome applications.
    Posted by Marzia Niccolai, App Engine Team





    Yesterday, Google App Engine held our first ever hack-a-thon at the Google Office in New York City. We had a great turn out of App Engine developers. Some programmed along with us, building a wiki, and some developers brought along their own ideas and spent the day building some awesome applications.



    At the end of the day, a few developers even came up and presented their work:
    • An application that provides 'a simple API for writing and reading small chunks of data from anywhere' : http://tinydb.org/
    • An app that adds photos to the developer's facebook account
    • An Open Source Django utility project: http://code.google.com/p/django-ae-utils/
    • An application that searches for clinical trials based on keywords
    • An application that uses GWT, Maps and Gears to track and map appointments and uses App Engine to keep the client side data synced
    • An app where users can list items for sale and get emails from interested buyers: http://sellstuff.appspot.com/

    Check out the pictures for the event at: http://picasaweb.google.com/appengine.hackathon/GoogleAppEngineHackathon#














    We look forward to seeing you at the San Francisco Hack-a-thon on May 16th

    Posted by Guido van Rossum, Software Engineer

    My first project as a Google engineer was an internal web app for code review. According to Wikipedia, code review is "systematic examination (often as peer review) of computer source code intended to find and fix mistakes overlooked in the initial development phase, improving both the overall quality of software and the developers' skills." Not an exciting topic, perhaps, but the internal web app, which I code-named Mondrian after one of my favorite Dutch painters, was an overnight success among Google engineers (who evidently value software quality and skills development :-). I even gave a public presentation about it: you can watch the video on YouTube.

    Posted by Guido van Rossum, Software Engineer

    My first project as a Google engineer was an internal web app for code review. According to Wikipedia, code review is "systematic examination (often as peer review) of computer source code intended to find and fix mistakes overlooked in the initial development phase, improving both the overall quality of software and the developers' skills." Not an exciting topic, perhaps, but the internal web app, which I code-named Mondrian after one of my favorite Dutch painters, was an overnight success among Google engineers (who evidently value software quality and skills development :-). I even gave a public presentation about it: you can watch the video on YouTube.



    I've always hoped that we could release Mondrian as open source, but so far it hasn't happened: due to its popularity inside Google, it became more and more tied to proprietary Google infrastructure like Bigtable, and it remained limited to Perforce, the commercial revision control system most used at Google.



    Fortunately, now that I work on the Google App Engine team, I've been able to write a new web app that incorporates many ideas (and even some code!) from Mondrian, and release it as open source. The Python open source community has been trying out Rietveld for the past few days, and has already been using it to do code reviews for Python (as well as providing valuable feedback in the form of bug reports and feature requests). Of course, the tool is not language-specific: you can use it for code reviews for any language!



    To learn more about Rietveld, try it out, or take a look at the code, check out the article on Google Code!

    Posted by Ken Ashcraft, Software Engineer

    Google App Engine makes writing scalable apps easier, and a well-designed app should be able to grow automatically from one user to millions. What does it mean for a Google App Engine application to be "well-designed," though? Here are a few simple tips that, if you design with them in mind, should help ensure your App will stand up with grace and aplomb, even under heavy load.
    Posted by Ken Ashcraft, Software Engineer

    Google App Engine makes writing scalable apps easier, and a well-designed app should be able to grow automatically from one user to millions. What does it mean for a Google App Engine application to be "well-designed," though? Here are a few simple tips that, if you design with them in mind, should help ensure your App will stand up with grace and aplomb, even under heavy load.


    • Avoid contention on datastore entities. If every request to your app reads or writes a particular entity, latency will increase as your traffic goes up because reads and writes on a given entity are sequential. One example construct you should avoid at all costs is the gobal counter, i.e. an entity that keeps track of a count and is updated or read on every request. There are some interesting ways of simulating this behavior that don't require reads/writes on every request, and we'll talk about a handy way to cache entities for reads below.


    • Avoid large entity groups. Any two entities that share a common ancestor belong to the same entity groups. All writes to an entity group are sequential, so large entity groups can bog down popular apps quickly if there are a lot of writes to that group. Instead, use small, localized groups in your design.


    • Write sparingly. Writes are more expensive than reads; keep this in mind when designing your data model. If you can avoid a write--it's best to do so.


    • Define a main() function for code reuse. Instances of your app are kept running for a certain period after each request, so there's a chance that any request will hit an already-running app. Apps that define main as in the following example:




      def main():

         application = webapp.WSGIApplication(_URLS, debug=True)

         wsgiref.handlers.CGIHandler().run(application)



      if __name__ == '__main__':

         main()


      can reuse global variables, so although there's no guarantee that any given request will hit a running app instance, you can take advantage of this to non-deterministically cache entities and other expensive values. This works simply because App Engine will detect if main() is present in an already-loaded script and call it instead of re-importing.


    • Profile your code. You can use the Python profiler to profile your code's performance.



    Do you have tips for scaling web apps on App Engine? Post them in our Google Group!

    Posted by Marzia Niccolai, Google App Engine Team



    Don't you think it'd be cool if you could blog about a party, add it to your calendar and invite all your friends in one fell swoop? After the party, how about viewing photos and videos from the event in the same application? The ...
    Posted by Marzia Niccolai, Google App Engine Team



    Don't you think it'd be cool if you could blog about a party, add it to your calendar and invite all your friends in one fell swoop? After the party, how about viewing photos and videos from the event in the same application? The Google Data APIs make all this possible, and your Google App Engine apps can use feeds from Google services to display and update information for a particular user stored by these services.




    The Google Data APIs team just released an update to the Google Data Python client library which includes support for Google App Engine. With this library, your app can now use AuthSub to gain access to your users' feeds.




    Jeff Scudder, member of the Google Data APIs team and the main contributor to the Google Data Python client library, has written an article that takes you through all of the steps necessary to use Google Data feeds in your Google App Engine application. He's even added his sample application to our Google App Engine sample code project.




    Try out it, and let us know what you come up with!

    Posted by Dick Wall, Google App Engine Team



    In May, Google will be holding two free Google App Engine developer events: one in New York and one in San Francisco.
    Posted by Dick Wall, Google App Engine Team



    In May, Google will be holding two free Google App Engine developer events: one in New York and one in San Francisco.




    Learn about Google App Engine


    The events will include training on the major features of Google App Engine, including data modeling, the App Engine APIs, some aspects of Django, and how to mashup App Engine with other web services. Google Engineers and Product Managers will be on hand to help and answer questions throughout the day.




    As well as covering the Google App Engine SDK, we will show you how to deploy and manage your own applications on Google App Engine servers. For people who don't already have a Google App Engine account, we will be inviting people who come to the hack-a-thon to develop on App Engine.




    Build With Us, or Build Your Own


    We will use the information shared at the event to build up a working Google App Engine application throughout the day, which you can code along with us. On the other hand, if you already have a great idea for what to build, bring that idea along. Even better, bring along anything you can prepare ahead of time (sketches, designs, web page mock ups, etc.) and use the time and information provided to develop your idea into a working application, then share it with the world.




    What Do I Need?


    We will provide facilities, power, food and refreshments and experts to help you learn to use Google App Engine and write your application. Just bring your laptops, ideas and enthusiasm to complete the mix. We will assume some basic skills and preparation for the event, and these details will be provided soon.




    When and Where?


    The first event will be in New York, on May 7th from 10am to 6pm. The second will be in San Francisco on May 16th from 10am to 10pm. Space is limited so sign up now!



    New York Hack-a-thon


    San Francisco Hack-a-thon

    Posted by Matt Brown, Google App Engine Team



    Since the launch of Google App Engine one of the most common requests has been for better integration with the popular Django framework.
    Posted by Matt Brown, Google App Engine Team



    Since the launch of Google App Engine one of the most common requests has been for better integration with the popular Django framework.



    We've been working hard and we've made available a helper that eases the process of developing a Django project to run on Google App Engine.



    The helper will initially provide you with:
    • The ability to use most manage.py commands
    • A BaseModel class that appears the same as the standard Django Model class.
    • The ability to serialize and deserialize model instances to JSON, YAML and XML.
    • Access to Django's test framework with a test datastore and support for fixtures.
    We are releasing the helper under the Apache 2.0 license. We look forward to working with the Django community to add further functionality as time goes on.



    You can download the helper from http://code.google.com/p/google-app-engine-django. Issues and Feature Requests should be added to the tracker within that project.

    Posted by Kevin Gibbs, Software Engineer


    One upcoming feature of Google App Engine that's worth mentioning is large-scale data import and export. We know that many of you have large apps that already run on other platforms, and getting all of that data into the Datastore API is a challenge. And, conversely, we also know that a lot of you want to make sure it's easy to move off Google App Engine in the future, in case you need to switch to a different platform.

    Posted by Kevin Gibbs, Software Engineer


    One upcoming feature of Google App Engine that's worth mentioning is large-scale data import and export. We know that many of you have large apps that already run on other platforms, and getting all of that data into the Datastore API is a challenge. And, conversely, we also know that a lot of you want to make sure it's easy to move off Google App Engine in the future, in case you need to switch to a different platform.



    With Google App Engine, you own all the data in your app. As stated in our terms, you always have the right to get your data out of Google App Engine at any point. We wouldn't have it any other way.



    To that end, we would like to solicit feedback on what form you would like the data exporter feature to take. We've started a thread in the discussion group about this, and we'd love to hear what you think. XML output? CSV transform? AtomPub? RDF? Let us know!

    Posted by Pete Koomen, Product Manager


    Google App Engine has been live for several days now and we're thrilled with the response we've gotten so far! We filled our initial batch of accounts within a few hours after Monday night's Campfire One. And today, we've just invited another 10,000 developers to try it out.

    Posted by Pete Koomen, Product Manager


    Google App Engine has been live for several days now and we're thrilled with the response we've gotten so far! We filled our initial batch of accounts within a few hours after Monday night's Campfire One. And today, we've just invited another 10,000 developers to try it out.



    We're excited to see the beginnings of a developer community forming in our Google Groups! We're actively reading your posts and responding with help where we can, and it's great to see some of the more experienced members of the community start helping others out too!



    We've also seen a lot of feature and bug reports on our Issue Tracker, including requests for Ruby, Java, Perl, PHP, and Fortran. Here are are some of the general areas we're focusing on right now:


    • Support for more languages. We're obviously huge Python fans, but we recognize that there are other great languages out there that developers use to build web applications.

    • Support for offline processing. Right now Google App Engine is great for web apps that do all of their processing in response to user requests, but what about apps that need to perform scheduled tasks or larger-scale data migration? We'd like to support those apps too.

    • Support for large files. Google App Engine currently imposes a limit of 1MB on all requests, both inbound and outbound. We're interested in providing efficient support for much larger uploads and downloads.

    • Billing for additional quota. During the preview release period, all apps are restricted to a set of free resource quotas. Although Google App Engine will always be free to get started, we plan on allowing developers to purchase additional resources in the future, while paying only for what they use.




    Judging by the the feedback we've gotten so far, these are areas you're interested in as well--we'll keep you posted. Keep letting us know what you think about the Google App Engine and where you think it should be headed!

    Posted by Paul McDonald, Product Manager


    At tonight's Campfire One we launched a preview release of Google App Engine -- a developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. The goal is to make it easy to get started with a new web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it's receiving significant traffic and has millions of users.

    Posted by Paul McDonald, Product Manager


    At tonight's Campfire One we launched a preview release of Google App Engine -- a developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. The goal is to make it easy to get started with a new web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it's receiving significant traffic and has millions of users.



    Google App Engine gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data. The development environment includes the following features:



    • Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies

    • Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)

    • Automatic scaling and load balancing

    • Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email

    • Fully featured local development environment



    Google App Engine packages these building blocks and takes care of the infrastructure stack, leaving you more time to focus on writing code and improving your application.



    Today's launch is a preview release -- we're by no means feature-complete, and we're giving you early access because we really want your feedback. This preview of Google App Engine is available for the first 10,000 developers who sign up, and we plan to increase that number in near future.



    During this preview period, applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. We expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million pageviews per month. In the future, these limited quotas will remain free, and developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed.



    If you'd like to try it out, sign up for access to the preview release and then download the SDK to get started. The best place to give us feedback is in the discussion group. Future announcements from us will appear there and/or this blog.