cloud-test: July 2012

Google Cloud Platform Blog

Announcing Google App Engine education awards

Monday, July 30, 2012

In addition to the startups and businesses we frequently highlight on our blog, we have seen educational institutions and their students build amazing applications, using Google App Engine as a platform for teaching and groundbreaking research.

Earlier this year we announced funding for researchers looking to use App Engine for scientific discovery. Today we are introducing the Google App Engine Education Awards to foster continued innovation from educational institutions in areas outside of research. Through this program we are inviting faculty members, initially from the United States, to submit proposals for using App Engine for their course development, educational research, university tools or for student projects. A selection of the proposals we receive will receive $1,000 in App Engine credits to assist in making the proposal a reality.

App Engine allows you to build scalable applications using the same technology that powers Google’s global-scale web applications. With no hardware to setup, App Engine makes it simple to learn how to write a simple web application or to build an application that handles millions of hits a day. If you haven’t already tried App Engine, we encourage you to download the SDK, follow the Getting Started Guide and take advantage of our free tier to deploy your first application.

If you teach at an accredited college, university or community college in the United States, we encourage you to apply. You can submit a proposal by filling out this form. Applications must be received by midnight PST August 31, 2012.

- Posted by the Google App Engine Team

Google

Analyzing your Google App Engine Logs with Google BigQuery

Monday, July 23, 2012

Developers know that logging and logs analysis can often mean the difference between delighting and disappointing users. With the Google App Engine LogService API, it’s easy to add logging to your App Engine App with just a few lines of code. But of course, logging events is only the beginning, and today we’re particularly excited to highlight using Google BigQuery to analyze your App Engine logs.

Google BigQuery is an externalized version of Google’s own logs analysis framework that allows developers to run queries across billions of rows of data in seconds via a RESTful API. BigQuery uses a familiar SQL-like query language and is able to scale to datasets that are terabytes in size and beyond. We see BigQuery as a natural fit for logs analysis, and at I/O this year, our developer relations team led a codelab demonstrating how to import and analyze App Engine logs with BigQuery.

Our customers have also had success with this technique, and App Engine developers at Streak.com posted their own walkthrough and Java framework, called Mache, for automatically exporting App Engine logs into BigQuery. Mache provides a simple interface for scheduling cron jobs that parse and ingest log file data into BigQuery at user-defined intervals.

If you’re interested in trying out Google BigQuery with App Engine, check out the getting started guide and the sample code from our I/O codelab. Happy logging!

- Posted by the Google App Engine Team

Also, if you’re interested in analyzing Datastore data in BigQuery, check out our article that shows how to use App Engine MapReduce to manage the transformation and export of Datastore entities.

Google

Develop in the cloud with eXo’s Cloud IDE

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Today’s post comes from Mark Downey of eXo, creator of Cloud IDE. Cloud IDE is an online IDE for Java, Python, PHP, Ruby or Javascript, and for nearly two years it has been used by developers to build applications for a number of PaaS environments. They recently added support for deploying code to Google App Engine.

Since eXo started the Cloud IDE project back in 2010, our objective has been to make developers more productive in building and deploying cloud-based apps. We’ve made it easy to import, build and debug code from Github and to deploy it to a PaaS. We have tried to make the development workflow as painless as possible by providing a smooth integration with popular Cloud services from source control to application hosting, and now we’re bringing that integration to the Google App Engine world.
Developers can now use Cloud IDE to build, debug and deploy App Engine apps without having to install and configure the App Engine SDK or any traditional desktop IDE. Everything happens right in the browser.It’s easy to get started. Once you have a Cloud IDE account, start a new project and select a Google App Engine app (Java or Python) as the project type. Confirm that you want to deploy to Google App Engine, and you will then be asked to create an app with your App Engine account.

This opens the App Engine admin console in a new browser tab, where you get to choose your app ID (which will define the URL of your application). Upon completion, a callback in the URL automatically updates your appengine-web.xml with your app ID, inside Cloud IDE.
That’s it! From there, just click deploy and enter your credentials to build and deploy your app on Google App Engine.

In Java, you can use auto-completion (alt+space) and have access to all the Google App Engine libraries. Many keyboard shortcuts are also available to help you develop efficiently (Help > Show Keyboard Shortcuts).
To run and debug your app on a development server, press Debug in the Run menu, and set your breakpoints. Your app will run in another browser tab and you’ll be able to inspect variables at runtime.

To re-deploy, just go to the App Engine menu in Project > PaaS > Google App Engine, and click Update Application.

The Google App Engine menu also enables you to view and update your App Engine services such as Indexes, PageSpeed, Queues, DoS, Resource Limits, Crons or Backends.

With eXo Cloud IDE, you can run, debug and deploy App Engine apps without having to install and configure the App Engine SDK or the Google Plugin for Eclipse (or, for that matter, Eclipse itself). Because everything related to your development activities is taking place on the Cloud IDE servers, your initial setup time is dramatically reduced. In a couple minutes you can be focusing on the things that matter most: coding and refining the app itself. - Contributed by Mark Downey, product manager for eXo Cloud Services @marksdowney

Google

Labels: Open Source

Another great year for App Engine at Google I/O

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

App Engine engineers talk to developers in the cloud platform sandbox at Google I/O

The dust has settled on another fantastic Google I/O. The skydiving demos and delicious jelly beans were great, but we had the most fun talking to developers and hearing about their experiences using Google’s technology. Here are the highlights of the App Engine talks from this year.

In our overview session, Peter Magnusson and Greg D’Alesandre introduced many of our new features and announced that we have attained 7.5 billion hits per day and are running more than 1 million active applications.

We announced Google Compute Engine and Alon Levi and Adam Eijdenberg showed how to use App Engine to orchestrate compute instances.

Cloud SQL began taking open signups and we witnessed an epic battle of the backends in our SQL vs NoSQL session, with Alfred Fuller representing the Datastore and Ken Ashcraft representing Cloud SQL.

We announced Google Cloud Endpoints and hosted a codelab to give developers early access to our trusted tester program.

Brian Quinlan covered the finer points of the Python 2.7 runtime.

And last but not least, Marzia Niccolai, Greg Darke and Troy Trimble gave some great tips for optimizing App Engine applications.

We’ll be taking a short break from our regularly scheduled release cycle in July, but we’ll get back on our usual drumbeat of monthly releases in August.

- Posted by the Google App Engine Team