The App Engine Team’s trip to I/O 2010 (Recap & Videos)
This year’s
Google I/O
included a flurry of announcements and presentations for the
App Engine team. Thanks to everyone who
attended our sessions, stopped by the Sandbox, or came to meet the team at our office hours.
It was great to meet all of you. For the App Engine developers out there that weren't able to
make it out this year, we wanted to give you a quick recap on what you missed.
We opened up the first day’s keynote with App Engine’s very own Kevin Gibbs
announcing
App Engine for Business and doing a demo of the new Business Admin Console. There’s
lots of great new features coming with App Engine for Business so if you missed the
announcement, please
read
more about it and
sign
up to be a part of the preview. We also announced our
work
with VMWare to connect our development tools in order to allow developers to use
SpringSource tools and Google Web Toolkit to build applications and deploy them on App
Engine.
If you were watching the keynote, you might have missed the
announcement that we
released
version 1.3.4 of the App Engine SDK which included a brand new bulkloader and
experimental support for OpenID and OAuth. The Blobstore API is also no longer experimental
and supports files up to 2GB in size.
In addition to all the high
profile announcements in the keynote, we also hosted a number of great sessions about App
Engine development for the rest of the conference. Thanks to the dedicated I/O organizers,
videos of all the App Engine sessions are now available so anyone can watch them (with more to
come in the next few days):
- Appstats - RPC instrumentation and optimizations for App
Engine - Guido van Rossum went into detail on how to use Appstats, a
new tool for App Engine developers which provides deep insight into why requests are slow and
what they’re doing under the covers.
- Run corporate applications on Google App Engine? Yes we
do - Ben Fried (Google’s CIO) and his team joined us to give an update
on their progress of moving Google’s corporate applications to App Engine, the problems they
ran into, and the success they had. They also announced that two of their apps are now being
open sourced for anyone to use.
- Batch
data processing with App Engine - Mike Aizatsky introduced Mapper, a
new tool which allows App Engine developers which makes it simple to write code that is run
over large datasets such as a Blobstore file or Datastore entities.
- Data migration in App Engine - Matthew
Blain gave a complete introduction to the brand new Bulk Loader which shipped as part of App
Engine’s 1.3.4 SDK. The session also provided a look into how to use the Bulk Loader with Java
applications and ways to import complex data models from a number of different sources.
- What's hot in Java for App Engine - The
same duo from last year’s introduction of the Java SDK, Don Schwarz and Toby Reyelts, were
back again this year to give an update on the progress of the Java SDK. Performance
optimizations, compatibility, and new APIs are all covered giving a peak under the hood for
Java developers.
- Building high-throughput data pipelines with Google App
Engine - Brett Slatkin reviewed the Task Queue and introduced a number
of strategies used to improve the performance of applications doing very high volumes of task
queue work. This session is based on lessons learned by Brett while building PubSubHubbub on App Engine.
- Testing techniques for Google App Engine
- Max Ross argued the virtues of proper software testing and then went to detail on how to
test your App Engine code properly and how to use App Engine to test all the rest of your
code.
- Next
gen queries - Alfred Fuller closed out the conference with a great
overview of recent improvements to the Datastore query planner and the new types of queries
that are possible, as well as a look at a few features on the horizon.
In
addition to the linked session titles where you'll find the videos and slides, you can also
find all videos in this
YouTube playlist
for App Engine I/O 2010 sessions.
There’s plenty of great information
in all the presentations, so for those of you that missed, we highly recommend you watch the
videos and read the slides. For everyone else that made it to I/O this year, thank you for
making this year’s I/O a complete success. It’s incredibly energizing for us to see all your
hard work, thoughtful questions, and great ideas on App Engine. We’re already excited to see
what you all surprise us with at next year’s I/O!
By Sean Lynch, App Engine Team
