Google App Engine
Myles Braithwaite <myles@monkeyinyoursoul.com>
Monkey in your Soul

Who am I?
• Indie/Hobby Programmer.

What is Google App
Engine?

• Allows you to run your web applications on
Google’s infrastructure
• Scaling is really simple
• No capital for system administrators

Google’s Server
Environment
• Web Server (HTTP and HTTPS)
• Datastore using BigTables (Schema Free)
• Authentication of users though Google
Accounts
• Scheduled Tasks (i.e. Cron)

Sandbox
• Applications can only access other
computers though HTTP and Email.
• Users can only access GAE applications
though HTTP.
• An application cannot write to the
filesystem.
• Application code only runs in response to an
HTTP request and has 30 seconds to run.

Getting Started with
App Engine

• Download the SDK @ code.google.com/
appengine

GAE SDK

GAE Project

Cron/Schedule Tasks

cron.yaml

Deploy your App

Windows or a Mac

GAE Roadmap
• Task queues for performing background
processing
• Ability to receive and process incoming
email
• Support for sending and receiving XMPP
(Jabber) messages

Message Queues

• Lets say you run a Wiki about Widgets.
• And you want to index all the external links.
• But you are on a Shared Host and have
limited resources.

ASITE.COM
Database
Search
BSITE.COM
Crawler
Index
CSITE.COM

Application requests
websites it
wants indexed.
ASITE.COM
Database
GAE
Search Application
BSITE.COM
Crawler
Index
CSITE.COM
GAE response
with crawled data.

Fear of the Elephant
• AppScale: http://appscale.cs.ucsb.edu/
• To run GAE on EC2 or Eucalyptus
• Some what Stable (Except no data
persistence)
• GAE2Django: http://tinyurl.com/gae2d/
• A bridge to run GAE code on Django.
• Some what Stable (Except no database
support)

Resources
• http://code.google.com/appengine
• http://appengine.google.com
• http://labs.google.com/papers/bigtable.html
• http://appgallery.appspot.com
• http://code.google.com/p/jaikuengine