Some small updates!

We're happy to announce we've released some small updates to Google App Engine. Among the more significant changes:

• More apps: Want to create more than 3 applications with your App Engine account? Now you can now create up to 10!
• Time windows for Dashboard graphs: Zoom in on the data in your dashboard to get a more accurate picture of whats going on. You can zoom in to see graphs for the last 24, 12, and 6 hour periods.
  
• Logs export: You can now use appcfg.py to download your application's logs in plaintext format. Use appcfg.py --help for more information on how to download your logs.
  
• Send email as logged in user: If you're using the users API, you can now send email from the email address of the currently-logged-in user.

Be sure to update your SDK and check the release notes for a full list of changes. Have more changes you'd like to see with App Engine? Let us know in our Google Group!



Posted by Paul McDonald, App Engine Team

Read More

Google Code Jam up and running on App Engine

Google Code Jam is a coding competition in which professional and student programmers are asked to solve complex algorithmic challenges in a limited amount of time. The contest is all-inclusive: Google Code Jam lets you program in the coding language and development environment of your choice. The Top 500 participants will advance to onsite competitions at a local Google office to compete against those in their region (Asia Pacific; Europe, Middle East and Africa; and the Americas). The Top 100 will participate in the final round at the Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California.


The application that runs the competition is built on App Engine. It was developed by a few Google engineers in their 20% time and is currently serving about 200 requests per second.


If you are interested in participating you still have a few hours to register. Go to the Code Jam site and check out the live scoreboard!


Posted byPaul McDonald, App Engine Team

Read More

App Engine Community Update

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, Google App Engine Team

Having spent the past two weeks tracking a hamster across America, creating collaborative pictures, and planning plenty of parties, I think it's time to get together another community update.

We were excited to find that one of our developers has started tracking App Engine performance, and hope to see more along these lines in the future. Developers continue to contribute information relating to the bulk loader, including an article that discusses UTF-8 and HandleEntity. And finally, Adobe AIR and Flex developers might be interested in this article about creating a photo application on Google App Engine.

Those of you who aren't content to just read may wish to get your hands dirty with some Open Source App Engine code. We've had 10 more additions to our Open Source project page, including projects that will interest all you Scrabble players, radio listeners, and RESTful developers.

Lastly, the forum discussion continues to keep pace, with topics that include IP geocoding, domain configuration, and continued discussion about the cap on indexed properties for an entity.

Keep letting us know what you've been up to!

Read More

App Engine Hack-a-thon: Chicago

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, Google App Engine Team

Please join us on July 31st for a Google App Engine Hack-a-thon in the Windy 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 and Product Managers 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 and San Francisco 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. Even better, bring along anything you can prepare ahead of time (sketches, designs, web page mock ups, etc.) and use the time and information provided to develop your idea into a working application, then share it 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, food and 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 Chicago hack-a-thon will take place Thursday July 31st, 2008 from 10AM-6PM. It will be held in Google's Chicago Office at 20 W. Kinzie St.

Space is limited so Sign Up now.

Read More

App Engine Community Update

Posted by Marzia Niccolai, Google App Engine Team

Over the past two months we've seen the App Engine community do some exciting things. To highlight community participation, we'll be posting regular App Engine community updates.

Applications

Below are some of the more popular ones we've seen:

• Wordle - Create word clouds for user provided text


• Guess-a-Sketch - Fans of Pictionary will love this sketching-guessing game!


• BuddyPoke - An OpenSocial application for interacting with your friends

Developer Articles

Many developers have written useful articles tutorials about App Engine. This week, we published our first externally written article on the App Engine developer pages Configuring Eclipse on Windows to Use With Google App Engine. Below are some other contributions we've found out there on the world wide web:

• Google Engineers are passionate about unit tests, and it's exciting to know our developers are too! App Engine fan wrote an article 'Unit tests for Google App Engine apps'.


• Thomas Brox Røst wrote an article that outlines porting the data of an existing Django App to App Engine.


• A big theme for App Engine at Google I/O was creating applications that scale. The developers at Logilab attended one of the talks and wrote up a very helpful summary on Building Scalable Web Apps.

Mobile usage is becoming increasingly popular across the globe. Ronan at dev.mobi wrote an article about using App Engine to create a mobile website.

Open Source Projects

Recently, we invited developers to list their Open Source projects on our group's pages. So far, we have 14 projects - these range from App Engine utility libraries, web frameworks, Open Source applications, and even an HTTP implementation of Map Reduce. Please continue to let us know what you are working on!

App Engine Group

Lastly, discussion continues to thrive on our Google group. Recently popular threads include discussions on full text search, session management, downloading apps, and executing common functionality before serving a request.

Read More

Google I/O session videos posted with slides

Posted by Pete Koomen, Google App Engine Team

On May 28th and 29th the Google Developer Team hosted Google I/O, a developer gathering in San Francisco. For anyone who wasn't able to join us in person, you can now now catch videos of more than 70 talks, along with slides from each of the presentations, online. Among these are some great sessions from members of the Google App Engine Engineering team:

• Best Practices - Building a Production Quality Application on Google App Engine
  
  Ken Ashcraft, Software Engineer



• Building Scalable Web Applications with Google App Engine
  
  Brett Slatkin, Software Engineer



• 
  Engaging User Experiences with Google App Engine
  
  Lindsey Simon, Web Developer, and John Skidgel, Senior Interaction Designer



• 
  Rapid Development with Python, Django, and Google App Engine
  
  Guido van Rossum, Software Engineer



• 
  Under the Covers of the Google App Engine Datastore
  
  Ryan Barrett, Software Engineer



• 
  Working with Google App Engine Models
  
  Rafe Kaplan, Software Engineer

There are also a lot of interesting talks on Android, Gears, AJAX Search API, Gadgets, GData, OpenSocial, and many other Google Developer products. Feel free to discuss in our group!

Read More

Announcing Open Signups, Expected Pricing, and two new APIs

Posted by Paul McDonald, App Engine Team



When we launched Google App Engine to 10,000 developers in early April, we were looking for feedback from the community. Since then, even though we've since expanded to 75,000 developers, the request we've heard most often has been to open up the preview release and give more people the chance to use it to deploy their apps to Google's scalable infrastructure. With more than 80,000 of you still waiting to use App Engine we're especially pleased today to announce that we are opening the flood gates--now anyone who wants to use App Engine can give it a try! So, if you haven't already, head over to our Admin Console and create your first application. Note: you'll need to verify your account with a mobile phone before doing so.



App Engine will always be free to get started, and we plan on enabling developers to purchase more computing resources sometime this year. Although we're not ready to offer this ability now, we've been asked by many developers to provide some insight into how we'll be pricing App Engine usage for applications that have exceeded the free quota of 500 MB of storage and around 5M pageviews per month. We'd like to be transparent about this, and have announced today that developers can expect to pay:

• $0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour
• $0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage
• $0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth
• $0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth

Likewise in response to your feedback we are also providing 2 new APIs, the image manipulation API and the Memcache API.



The image manipulation API enables developers to resize, rotate, flip, crop and enhance images using the same infrastructure used in Picasa Web Albums. With the images API you can perform common image related tasks like thumbnailing images via a simple interface. For more information about the images API, please see our documentation.



The Memcache API is a high-performance caching layer designed to make page rendering faster by reducing datastore queries and improving the performance of your application. The Memcache API was written by Brad Fitzpatrick, the same developer who created memcached, a caching layer that is used in some of the world's most popular web applications, and is compatible with memcached implementations. Please see our documentation for more information about the Memcache API.



These features and improvements were motivated by your feedback and participation in our development process. We're working hard to respond to all of your requests so please continue to share them with us!

Read More