Our favorite recipes for App Engine, all in one place

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

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A couple datastore updates

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

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New third-party party tool for monitoring App Engine cluster status

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

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Take it with you, the whole kit-and-caboodle

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.

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App Engine Hack-a-thon: Seattle

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.

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The Deep Dish on the App Engine Developer Community

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!

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