Google App Engine on the Road

More members of the App Engine team are hitting the road in the next two
weeks. If you'll be at any of the following events we'd love to meet and talk
shop! Here's where you can find us:

Wednesday March 18th
5:00
pm - 6:00 pm

New York City

Pete Koomen will be at title="CommunityOne East"
href="http://developers.sun.com/events/communityone/2009/east/">CommunityOne
East participating in the Closing Panel Discussion – "Enterprises and
the Cloud". The panel will be moderated by David Berlind, Editor-At-Large of
InformationWeek, and the panelists include Adam Gross, Vice President of
Developer Marketing, Salesforce and Lew Tucker, Vice President and CTO, Cloud
Computing, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Wednesday March 25th

9:00 am - 12:20 pm

Chicago

Joe Gregorio will be
teaching a half-day tutorial at PyCon 2009 entitled href="http://us.pycon.org/2009/tutorials/schedule/1AM6/">An
Introduction to Google App Engine. From the session description:
"Google App Engine allows you to build scalable web applications and host them
on Google hardware. This hands on tutorial will walk you through the steps of
building a basic web application, from setting up the SDK through to using the
major APIs that App Engine provides."

Thursday March 26th

1:30 pm - 2:30 pm

Philadelphia

Joe Gregorio will be giving the
presentation "Under the Covers of the App Engine Datastore" on March 26th
at the Emerging
Technologies for the Enterprise conference in Philadephia.

From the session description: "This talk walks through the
internals of the App Engine Datastore, how data is stored, how indexes are
built, and how queries are executed. We then discuss how those
architectural decisions make the App Engine datastore scalable and finally
go into how those constraints affect how you design your applications
schema so your application can take full advantage of that
scalability."

Wednesday April 1st

Time TBD

New York City

For the second time in two weeks we return to New York City
where Joe Gregorio will be giving the same "Under the Covers of the App
Engine Datastore" talk at the Cloud Computing
Expo in New York City.

Posted by Joe Gregorio, App Engine Team

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Jaiku moves to App Engine, new article on remote_api, and more!

A number of exciting App Engine-related snippets have made the rounds over the past couple of weeks. Here's a quick summary:

Jaiku moves to App Engine

Last April, Jaiku's official blog confirmed that Jaiku was being ported to App Engine. We are pleased to announce that not only is Jaiku now hosted on App Engine, but substantial progress is being made on the related open source effort to build out the Jaiku-based microblogging platform, Jaiku Engine, which allows organizations, groups, and invidivuals to deploy their own microblogging service to App Engine. For more details, check out the official Jaiku blog posting.

Trender apps launched on App Engine

Jaiku isn't the only application to launch on App Engine in recent weeks. Enter NYT Trender and Flickr Trends which allow users to view the popularity of search terms over time based on occurrence in the New York Times and Flickr respectively. Both mashups display relevant photos for the terms entered, adding to the richness of the experience.

New remote_api article available

Googler Nick Johnson recently published a handy guide introducing the remote_api module which debuted with release 1.1.9 of the App Engine SDK. The module allows remote access to an application's datastore and Nick's guide describes how to set up and use it with plenty of sample code to help you build your own interactive console and map framework. Also, in case you missed them when they were first posted, the articles on paging and avoiding datastore contention using sharded counters are great reads as well, particularly if you're interested in building a highly scalable and efficient apps.

App Engine at WeekendApps

Over the weekend of Feb. 20th, 130 developers descended on the Googleplex in order to design, build, and launch an OpenSocial-based application as part of the WeekendApps - OpenSocial event. While OpenSocial was the star of the show, App Engine garnered a lot of interest itself with BuddyPoke! creator Dave Westwood and App Engine advocate Fred Sauer in attendance. In the end, over 14 new applications were presented, at least 3 of which were built on App Engine. Of these three, the team behind Buddy Quiz! won a Google I/O pass for "best product vision" and another, Yumie Date, recently received an Editor's Pick promotion from MySpace. Neither team had ever used App Engine prior to the event and one had never even worked with Python.

Posted by Jason Cooper, Google App Engine Team

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Join App Engine at SXSW

Several of the App Engine team members are excited to be heading to Austin, Texas for SXSW Interactive 2009. SXSW always brings together an talented variety of web developers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries. If you'll be there too, we'd love to meet and talk shop!
If you are interested in participating in an App Engine User Study while at SXSW, please fill out this form.

Sunday, March 14th


10:00 pm - 1:00 am


The App Engine team is joining forces with the Blogger and Reader teams for a bash "Read. Write. Drink." at Six Lounge (117 W 4th St @ Colorado). Come share a beer and tales of website building and hosting with us! Bring your SXSW Interactive Badge, or find an App Engine team member at the conference and ask for an invitation. Before the party, Engineers from the App Engine team, including Tech Lead, Kevin Gibbs, are having "office hours" from 8-10pm at Halcyon Coffeeshop (218 W 4th St) where we'll hang out, sip coffee and talk shop - we want to answer your tough technical questions and to help you learn if App Engine is a good fit for your application or business. We'll have some T-shirts, and copies of our new cheat sheet!

Tuesday March 17th


10:00 - 11:00 am, Room 8


Kevin Gibbs, App Engine's Tech Lead, will be participating in the panel "Cloud Computing: Defending the Undefinable" along with Yousef Khalidi, Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft and Werner Vogels, the CTO at Amazon.com. Here's the panel description:
"The brave new world of cloud computing is radically changing how we build web applications. What is a platform, what is a service, and how will the future of web applications be built? More importantly, how do these various clouds compare, and what do the differences mean? Are they ready for your world-rockin' startup? In this panel, we'll get nerdy with technical details, you'll yell at us, and we'll argue why your app should already be in the cloud."

Monday March 16th

9th Annual 20x2 Event

7:00 - 9:30 PM, The Parish on 6th St in Austin

20x2 brings together 20 different participants from all walks of creative life and each person has two minutes to answer/interpret the same question before a live audience. The question for this show is "What's It Gonna Take?" App Engine team member Lindsey Simon will be speaking.

If you're in the area, stop by! If not, you can always leave feedback in our Google Group!

Posted by Lindsey Simon, Google App Engine Team

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