What is Google App Engine?

Google App Engine is a unique hosting platform that lets you build applications and run them in Google’s data centers using the massive global infrastructure built to run the Internet’s most powerful company. App Engine offers a development environment that uses familiar technologies (Java and Python) and provides a powerful and robust set of APIs to users while maintaining security and independence from other apps running in the cloud. It is always free to get started so you can try it out with no risk, and if you need additional computing resources, you can purchase additional computing resources beyond the free quota limits. (If you enable billing and trust us with your credit card, we will extend your free quotas even further; you won’t get charged until you exceed those extended quotas.) Scale your application to millions of users and pay only for what you use at competitive market pricing.

In this session, we provide an update of the newest features found in the most recent releases of the App Engine platform. We also share some suggestions for best practices to existing App Engine developers.

Beginners to the App Engine platform will be interested in the introductory workshop which may be offered (see description below).

Google App Engine workshop

In this tutorial, we’ll give you a comprehensive introduction to the platform in two/three components:

• 1-hour Introduction to Cloud computing and Google App Engine seminar
• 3-hour App Engine hands-on workshop/codelab

In the first hour, we review Cloud Computing as an industry and where Google App Engine fits into the picture. Specifically, we discuss App Engine as a PaaS solution because of the inherent challenges of building web and other applications. We’ll outline the architecture of App Engine, what it’s major components are, introduce its features and APIs, discuss the service and how it works (including information on the free quotas), present some information about current users and usage, including integration with Google Apps, and finally, give an overview of its enterprise edition called Google App Engine for Business.

After the approximately one-hour lecture, we’ll show you how to create applications that run on App Engine by building a simple but real web application from the ground up via a hands-on coding laboratory. Although based on the online tutorial, this codelab goes up and beyond what’s in the documentation: you will get a more detailed step-by-step instructions to replicate that example as well as have the opportunity to extend your application with some of the newer APIs that come with App Engine. The codelab will cover the Users service, non-relational Datastore, and Memcache APIs. Time-permitting, we’ll also discuss some of the newest features found in recent App Engine releases.