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- 2009-Jul-08: One man finds he does not like Google's App Engine. [8240]
- 2008-Oct-17: Google has added some support for HTTPS to appspot.com. [7042]
- 2008-Sep-21: Initial impressions of Google App Engine mentions problems with testing. [6894]
- 2008-Sep-19: Using GAE to provide authentication to a desktop application. [6888]
- 2008-Sep-15: One user's thoughts on the App Engine after using it for a while. And his App Engine 101 slides. [6857]
- 2008-Sep-08: Baby steps with the Google App Engine talks about starting to deploy a web site under GAE. [6812]
- 2008-Aug-26: How to make XML-RPC calls from within a Google App Engine server - to get around the Google sandbox limitation that forbids the creation of sockets, but allows outgoing HTTP requests. [6745]
- 2008-Aug-11: How to Understand AppEngine Datastore Under the Hood a two part article, Part 1 - An Overview of the Underview and Part 2 - The Raw Datastore API [6662]
- 2008-Jul-23: Using HMAC to control which Google accounts get access to an App Engine service. [6568]
- 2008-Jun-19: Google's App engine experiences its first significant outage. [6376]
- 2008-Jun-13: There is a now ShowMeDo for the App Engine. [6337]
- 2008-May-29: Google has opened up access to AppEngine and added some new APIs, including one for image manipulation. [6259]
- 2008-May-07: Guido is part of the App Engine team and has implemented a source code review system with it called Rietveld. [6068]
- 2008-Apr-18: Using nose to test App Engine sites. [5907]
- 2008-Apr-15: An experiment with running PyPi (the Python package index, cheeseshop) on App Engine. Plus some more observations on the politics of what Google is doing with App Engine. [5815]
- 2008-Apr-15: It is possible to run Google's App Engine software (the SDK emulation environment) on an Amazon EC2 server - now Google's working for Amazon. [5806]
- 2008-Apr-14: In App Engine and Pylons Ian Bicking talks about various Python modules that don't work on App Engine and why. He also talks about trying to monkeypatch around some of the issues. [5800]
- 2008-Apr-14: Using the Google Datastore from the App Engine. You will need to think a bit outside of the typical RDBMS box. [5798]
- 2008-Apr-13: Google App Engine: The good, the bad, and the ugly is a through look at the App Engine and what Google might really be up to. [5790]
- 2008-Apr-11: Chad Whitacre really likes App Engine. [5774]
- 2008-Apr-11: Niall Kennedy takes a first look at the App Engine, this mentions some of the unknowns about what Google will charge for scaling up the service once this goes commercial. [5773]
- 2008-Apr-11: The App Engine takes some heat for not responding to issues fast enough. [5772]
- 2008-Apr-11: What is the business case for the App Engine? Could this be a massive recruitment system - build a pool of developers who know some of your APIs, collect all there work in one central (easy to review) place and then set your recruiter team to work skimming the cream off the pot? [5771]
- 2008-Apr-11: On 8-Apr-08 Google started to preview their Google App Engine, discussed here on Slashdot.
Their overall design goals:
- make it easy to use
- make it easy to scale
- free to start (small apps)
What Google will do for you:
- Run the web applications
- provide the full life cycle, logs, status, updating, database...
- provide access to Google's scalable infrastructure, google accounts, big table, Google FS
To do this the application stack they provide has:
- Scalable serving infrastructure
- Python runtime
- SDK
- Web based administration console
- Datastore (based on big Table)
Their environment does allow you to run a local test server, so you can do your application development on your own private machine.
They provide a basic Django template module.
Seems to follow the Python wsgiref module.
An initial presentation of this is in these videos.
One of the things this does is to get you to build things using Google tools which may result in an implementation that is difficult to move to some other service provider without doing a complete rewrite. Whereas if you were using Amazon's EC2 you are writing for a more standard LAMP style environment so you should be able to take whatever you develop and run it somewhere else. Of course, if you keep this all in mind it might not be a big issue, use the Google tools to develop a prototype and test the waters before investing in a full scale project.
With Google's use of Python as the first application language to be supported by this system it has caused an unprecedented stir in the Python community, see:
- Simon Brunning
- Ivan Krstić
- Pirnat.com
- Sean McGrath
- Steve Holden
- Titus Brown
- Pythoneering
- Simon Brunning
- Django on AppEngine the TomatoBase project.
- Phillip Pearson who observes that this could be a very big thing for small projects as it appears to scale down well.
- Dave Winer calls Google's AppEngine the new BASIC.
- Django on Google App Engine in 13 simple steps a short tutorial by Thomas Røst.
- Brett Taylor (who claims to have been the PM of the App Engine project in June'07) proves that a small application is easy to write by writing his own blog with it.
- OpenID can be used instead of Google's Account support.
- Ian Bicking talks about this from the perspective of the small application.
- in Return of the Unofficial Python Job Board Feed we see some limitations of the current Google App Engine API appear, such as the lack of scheduled background tasks and task queues.