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.


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!






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.




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!




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 ...



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!