Google Cloud Platform Blog: Using Tailbone to talk to App Engine with JavaScript

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Using Tailbone to talk to App Engine with JavaScript

Monday, March 18, 2013

Today’s post comes from Doug Fritz from the Data Arts Team of the Google Creative Lab. In this post, Doug shares a small open source project for reading and writing to the Google App Engine Datastore with JavaScript.
Today, the Google Creative Lab is sharing a small open source project called Tailbone that lets developers read and write to the Google App Engine Datastore using JavaScript. We’re hoping that it makes App Engine a bit more accessible to developers who aren’t familiar with Python, Java or Go, or prefer not to use them.

I share an office with three creative programmers who work almost entirely in HTML5 and JavaScript. An important part of our work is writing server-side code for new projects that read or write data to to the App Engine Datastore or use Google accounts to store authenticated user-specific information. To make that process easier for my JavaScript-fluent colleagues, I created Tailbone to act as a RESTful API for an app’s Datastore.

To get started, you still have to install App Engine’s SDK and Python, but after that you’re all set. We’ve written a detailed tutorial that guides you through the installation and an example app for creating an authenticated profile page with an editable name and photo.

It’s my hope that Tailbone makes App Engine a little bit less intimidating for people who don’t have much experience with server-side coding. I know there are a few in my office. If there are any others out there, this is for you.

-Posted by Doug Fritz, Creative Lab, Data Arts Team