Google App Engine @ I/O: Java, offline processing, great partners. and more

JUN 08, 2009

2009 has been a busy year for the App Engine team, but all along we've looked forward to Google I/O and the excitement it brings to Google's developer community. At I/O last year, App Engine was brand new and many attendees were just getting familiar with the project. Well, what a difference a year makes - this year, in addition to sharing new information about our project, we got to learn about an amazing host of App Engine projects from you, our developers!

First, the big news - we are excited to announce open signups for our Java language runtime. During Wednesday's keynote, Engineering Manager Kevin Gibbs and Product Manager Andrew Bowers demoed the combined power of App Engine and GWT, all with easy deployment from the Eclipse IDE. If you've not tried our new language yet, please head over to the Admin Console to signup, then download the SDK and get programming.

The engineers behind Google App Engine for Java presented two sessions. First, Toby Reyelts and Don Schwarz introduced the new runtime with App Engine: Now Serving Java, including details of how our Java language layer exposes the power of Google's infrastructure. Be sure to check out the interactive game they demo'd with audience participation! Digging a bit deeper, Max Ross showed us The Softer Side of Schemas - how he mapped Java Persistence Standards to App Engine's datastore.

In addition to the new Java runtime, App Engine developer Brett Slatkin previewed some eagerly anticipated functionality: offline tasks. In his talk Offline Processing on App Engine: a Look Ahead, Brett revealed the first few milestones of App Engine's plan for offline processing with our upcoming Task Queue API. Leveraging the power of a web hook (an HTTP request body and URL) as the fundamental unit of execution on the web, this new API will allow you to organize and enqueue tasks for efficient background processing. Stay tuned to the App Engine blog for this feature's launch.

The App Engine team is always eager to share information about our infrastructure and how things work under the hood. Alon Levi kicked things off Wednesday morning with From Spark Plug to Drive Train: Life of an App Engine Request, in which he showed new information about how an application's incoming requests are received, scheduled, and executed by App Engine. Ryan Barrett presented some of the theoretical, yet practical challenges faced by the App Engine team with Transactions Across Datacenters (and Other Weekend Projects). Finally, Brett Slatkin took the stage once again, with Building Scalable, Complex Apps on App Engine, to give you insights on advanced data structures and algorithms.

In addition to the App Engine team, we were thrilled to have App Engine customers and partners present about their experience with the platform:

The Walk Score team shared their experience combining App Engine with other products in App Engine Nitty-Gritty: Scalability, Fault Tolerance, and Integrating Amazon EC2.
Ola Bini gave a language implementor's view of our new Java runtime with JRuby and Ioke on Google App Engine for Java.
Daniel Wilkerson presented distributed database theory in A Design for a Distributed Transaction Layer for Google App Engine.
Guillaume Laforge from SpringSource did a rapid walkthrough of Groovy and how to write Groovy applications for App Engine with Groovy and Grails in App Engine

Last but not least, more partners joined our Developer Sandbox to share their experience building projects on Google App Engine: 3scale, Best Buy, BuddyPoke, EZAsset, Gigapan, LifeAware, Salesforce.com, SpringSource, and ThoughtWorks.

Thanks for making this year's Google I/O a fantastic success! We have much more in store for 2009, so be sure to watch the App Engine blog for updates!

By Mike Repass, App Engine Team

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