Mobile voucher sales terminal in Africa powered by App Engine

Today’s guest blogger is Dale Humby, CTO of Nomanini.  Nomanini is a startup based in South Africa which provides a platform to sell prepaid products such as airtime, electricity and insurance electronically.  In this post, Dale explains how the backend systems of their flagship device, Lula, run on App Engine.IntroductionIn rural markets, it is often difficult to distribute physical vouchers, which can be used to provide access to services...

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App Engine 1.7.4 Released

The Google App Engine team has been busy putting together our final release of 2012. This release includes a number of features graduating from Experimental status as well as the usual batch of bug fixes and improvements. We’ll be taking a short break from our monthly release cycle over the holidays, but we’ll be back to our normal schedule starting in February.  Expanded EU SupportWe’re happy to announce that we are expanding European Union datacenter support, based on positive feedback from early users.  You can sign up here.  Please...

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Get started at no cost with a faster, larger Google Cloud SQL database

You want your application to be fast. Databases play a big role in your overall application speed and end-users’ experience. Reads and writes should execute instantly, even as your user base grows to millions of users, and this requires faster, larger databasesGoogle App Engine is designed to scale. And now Google Cloud SQL, a MySQL database that lives in Google’s cloud, is scaling up alongside App Engine to meet that demand for faster access to more data. With the features we are launching today, you can now work with bigger, faster MySQL databases...

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Upgrading to Python 2.7: simple and practical

We launched a major improvement to the Python runtime when we introduced support for Python 2.7 last February. It has since proven to be astonishingly popular – just a few months later more than half of all active Python applications on App Engine are using Python 2.7.What’s so great about Python 2.7? It isn’t just a language update, it also includes a number of features that can help your apps run much more efficiently.Increase efficiency with concurrent requests. Now a single frontend instance can handle multiple requests at the same time in...

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Developer Insights: Teaching thousands of students to program on Udacity with App Engine (part 2)

This post is the second of our two-part series discussing how Udacity uses Google App Engine.Today’s guest blogger is Chris Chew, senior software engineer at Udacity, which offers free online courses in programming and other subjects.  Chris shares how Udacity itself is built using App Engine.Steve Huffman blogged yesterday about how App Engine enables the project-based learning that makes his web development course so powerful.  People...

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Developer Insights: Teaching thousands of students to program on Udacity with App Engine, Steve Huffman (part 1)

This post is the first of our two-part series discussing how Udacity uses Google App Engine.Today’s guest blogger is Steve Huffman, founder of Reddit and Hipmunk.  Steve recently taught a web development course at Udacity, which offers free online courses in programming and other subjects.  Steve shares his experience using Google App Engine to teach the course.This past spring I had the pleasure of teaching a course for Udacity, an online...

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About today's App Engine outage

This morning we failed to live up to our promise, and Google App Engine applications experienced increased latencies and time-out errors.We know you rely on App Engine to create applications that are easy to develop and manage without having to worry about downtime. App Engine is not supposed to go down, and our engineers work diligently to ensure that it doesn’t. However, from approximately 7:30 to 11:30 AM US/Pacific, about 50% of requests to App Engine applications failed.Here’s what happened, from what we know today:Summary4:00 am - Load begins...

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App Engine 1.7.3 Released

For our October release we have a number of offerings, fixes, and small refinements as colorful as the fall season.General EnhancementsDjango 1.4 is now fully supported for Python 2.7Java classloading priority can now be granted to specific JAR files.  This is an experimental feature. More information can be found here.App Engine SDK support for Java 7With Java 7, many new language enhancements have been added, including:The ability to use the String class in Switch statementsExpression of binary literals using simple prefixes 0b or 0BSingle...

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Developer Insights: Building scalable social games on App Engine

Today’s guest blogger is Hernan Liendo, CTO of Zupcat, developer of social games played by millions of people worldwide.  Hernan shares his team’s experience using App Engine to build RaceTown, a multiplayer racing game.  Choosing a cloud service providerRaceTown is one of Zupcat’s most popular games; it has almost 900,000 monthly unique users, opens more than 40,000 connections via the Channel API per day, processes more than 15,000 queries...

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