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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Developer Insights: Streak brings CRM to the inbox with Google Cloud Platform

Cross-posted with the Google Developers BlogToday’s guest blogger is Aleem Mawani, co-founder of Streak, a startup alum of Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley incubator.  Streak is a CRM tool built into Gmail.  Aleem shares his experience building and scaling their product using Google Cloud Platform.Everyone relies on email to get work done – yet most people use separate applications from their email to help them with various business processes....

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Jenkins, meet Google App Engine

Today’s guest post comes from Ryan Campbell and Stephen Connolly, developers at CloudBees. CloudBees is a major supporter of Jenkins, the popular open source continuous integration server, and the creator of DEV@Cloud, a hosted version of Jenkins.As development teams grow, it becomes increasingly hard to ensure that their work is in sync. Jenkins is one of the leading tools to combat this issue. Jenkins provides a process where work across your team is automated, so that building, testing and deployment are all centralized in one location. As a...

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New Google BigQuery Launch includes Datastore Import for Trusted Testers

Google BigQuery, a service for performing real-time analytics on your data, launched several exciting new features this morning.  Part of the release is a new feature which enables you to import data from our experimental Datastore backup tool directly into BigQuery for analysis.  We are opening up this capability to a small group of trusted testers - please sign up here if you’re interested.The BigQuery launch also includes support for JSON and its nested/repeated structure as well as significant improvements to the data loading pipeline....

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