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