Please join us in November for a Google App Engine Hackathon in Atlanta and Ann Arbor. Not only can you learn more about App Engine, but you can also share ideas with local developers, look for partners on your latest project, get support, brainstorm, and network.
Learn about Google App Engine There will be talks on the major features of Google App Engine at different points throughout the day. We will run through developing an app with the SDK and show how to deploy and manage applications on Google App Engine. Google App Engine and Python enthusiasts from the community will be on hand to help and to answer questions throughout the day.
Build With Us, or Build Your Own You are welcome to 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. Or, you can code along with us in building a Google App Engine application from start to finish.
What Do I Need? There will be power, refreshments and Python enthusiasts 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 Atlanta hackathon will take place Saturday November 15, 2008 from 10AM-6PM at Google Atlanta in Millennium in Midtown, 10 10th Street NE, Suite 600, Atlanta, GA 30309 (map) Sign up now for the Atlanta hackathon.
The Ann Arbor hackathon will take place Monday November 17, 2008 from 10AM-6PM at Google Ann Arbor in 201 S. Division St., Ann Arbor, MI 48104 (map) Sign up now for the Ann Arbor hackathon.
Hosted By:
Harpal Gujral (Atlanta) Matt Simmons (Ann Arbor)
When we find tools that work well for us at Google, we like to share them with our customers. That's what we're doing today as we launch Labs for Google Apps, a place for us to deliver cool new experimental features to our Google Apps enterprise users. The applications we're launching today into Labs for Google Apps are:
Here's a peek under the hood of these new Labs tools.
Since Google App Engine launched in April, Googlers have been using it to build and port a number of useful applications--some of which are the apps we're launching today into Google Labs.
The challenge in building these features was to design a system to centrally deploy a single application to many (many!) Google Apps customers, each on a separate domain. We needed to create data sandboxes for each customer within the app. We needed to add domain administrator controls. We needed to make it safe and easy to use and we needed big-time scalability. That's why we built these new applications on App Engine -- it provided us with a container that combined scalability and rapid development with our experience building powerful applications that Google users love.
Here at Google, we're very serious about keeping user data safe. We designed safety mechanisms to enforce the separation of namespaces in the datastore so that data remains secure and private on each domain. We also added integration with the Google Apps control panel for customer-level administrative controls.
Today's launch is just the beginning, and we're going to introduce more useful apps into the Labs for Google Apps over time. We also intend to eventually open up this platform to all App Engine developers, so that new and existing software vendors can build easy-to-consume software for the million-plus businesses using Google Apps today.
Want to be a part of it? Check out the Solutions Marketplace and you can pick and choose which Labs for Google Apps features you want for your domain. We've put feedback links in too so you can let us know what's good and what's not--the good stuff may make it into Google Apps one day.
Happy experimenting!
Many of you have expressed interest in learning about what's coming next for Google App Engine, and although we've often talked about features we plan on supporting, we've decided to publish this roadmap along with our documentation. Without further ado, here's what we've got coming up in the next 2 quarters:
At Google we've historically avoided giving release dates for our products because we know that software development is incredibly hard to predict. Thus, it should be noted that while we're working hard on these features, development schedules do slip at times, and the dates below may change. We'll do our best to update this roadmap as our engineers continue development.
For reference, since our release in April, we've already added:
Remember, you can always let us know what you think on our Google Group!
Have something to ask the App Engine team? Spending time scratching your head on a problem and want to ask someone who spends his or her days and nights working with App Engine? Spend all of your time on IRC anyway?
Starting this week, the App Engine developer relations team will be experimenting with holding bi-monthly 1 hour developer chat sessions on the #appengine IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. Look here for a helpful list of IRC clients. We welcome all App Engine questions, and will try to answer as many as we can get through in the hour. We'll be posting the complete chat sessions on the group for those not able to make the scheduled chat times.
The first chat session will be this Wednesday at 9AM PDT. In general, we are planning on holding the sessions the first and third Wednesday of the month, alternating between day and evening. We're test-driving this program, so the days and times may change.
Here are the currently scheduled dates and times:
We look forward to chatting with you! And, remember, you can always post your questions to our Google Group, which we read and respond to regularly.
One of the most frequently requested features for App Engine has been HTTPS serving capabilities. Today we're excited to announce that App Engine now supports incoming HTTPS connections using a certificate valid for all appspot.com URLs. Here's how it works:
app.yaml
- url: /accounts/.* script: admin.py login: admin secure: always
This attribute can be set to either always, optional, or never (default), and determines the behavior of the handler for HTTP and HTTPS requests. See our documentation for more details.
always
optional
never
You may be wondering why we're only supporting appspot.com right now, and not arbitrary Google Apps domains. This has to do with fundamental limitations in the SSL protocol. We're currently investigating workarounds for this using e.g. SNI, which provides a viable solution for newer browsers--we'll keep you posted!
As always, please tell us what you think in our Google Group, and let us know what else you'd like to see!
Today we've released some new features in our Admin Console to make it easier for you to manage your application.
Admin Logs: This new feature displays a record of all actions committed by the application's admins. Click on 'Admin Logs' under the 'Administration' section of the navigation bar. You can search for app configuration, version management, developer administration, and datastore changes. Just choose the desired event from the drop down and click 'Display'!
Regex Filtering in Logs: Looking for all requests that throw a certain error? Want information on all requests containing specific query arguments? Use the new regex filter on the logs page of your admin console to search for requests that contain text matching a given regular expression. Note: at most 10,000 log records are searched per request; use the Next link to search further back. The time stamp of the last record searched (not the last record matched!) is displayed to help you decide whether to search further back. If the end of the logs is reached, the Next link is not shown.
Log URLs can now be bookmarked: The logs URLs in the admin console now include an offset argument so that you can bookmark interesting pages, and send them to other admins. This also enables usage of the 'back' button on your logs pages.
We hope these changes will make it easier for you to manage your app and troubleshoot any issues you may have.
It's been a few weeks, but it's time again to roll up all the goings-on in the App Engine community.
First, if you haven't read it already, you should check out Andi Albrecht's article 'Running App Engine Applications on Django'. He wrote an article discussing his project, gae2django, which was built to run App Engine Django apps on any hosting system that supports Django.
We've also been very excited to see some great new applications built on App Engine. For those of us concerned about being green, PrintWhatYouLike.com offers you a way to print only parts of a website you need. If you want some food for thought everyday along with your breakfast, check out Puzzazz, which gives you a new puzzle every day to solve. And if you are feeling artistic, visit picjuice.com to edit your photos online.
Several teams at Google have even released their own apps using App Engine, including tools for Chromium coders, inquisitive types, or anyone interested in changing the world.
Finally, we are happy to announce a new program for those of you wishing to hold App Engine hackathons in your hometown, Hackathon-in-a-Box.
Takashi Matsuo was nice enough to pilot our Hackathon-in-a-Box program in Japan at the end of September, and it was a great success. Twenty-five App Engine developers attended the event, which was held at the Google office in Tokyo. They reviewed a translation of Building Scalable Web Applications that Takashi prepared, and then got to coding their own applications. See below for a slide show of the event.
If you're interested in holding your own Hackathon-in-a-Box, please read the program guidelines on our Sites page and then get in touch with us by emailing admins@hackathoninabox.com to get started!
If you have any questions or discussion topics, checkout our group!
Today is the release of the 1.1.5 SDK, which, as always, is available for download on our Google hosting project. The release notes contain all of the nitty gritty details. Here's a summary:
For this release, we've added these features:
The SDK also contains the following issue fixes:
It's also worth noting we released the 1.1.4 SDK on Friday, September 26, fixing two Windows SDK bugs: one issue with escaping in the app.yaml file, and another fixing issues with the datastore viewer on the SDK.
We'd love to hear your feedback on the Google group!
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