Get started building your own web apps with the Google App Engine

The App Engine lets you easily deploy web applications built with the Python language.

I’ve only been at this for an hour or so, and already I’ve gotten a dev environment installed and working properly on this Vista laptop. This is a big step up from my attempts to install & run Ruby on Rails via Ubuntu Linux. I’m stepping through the Google App Engine howto docs if you want to follow along at home.

As the video below explains, you’ll only have to download and run three installers to get things going: The GAE SDK, Python itself, and EasyEclipse for Python. The last one is technically optional but I didn’t want to code in Notepad. Stay tuned for my first Google App!

While you’re waiting, check out these cool GAE apps I’ve tried in the past: Spy by Ben Hedrington and FF2Disqus by Carter Rabasa.

TC50: Demopit Winner Socialwok Lays A Great Social Layer Over Google Apps (techcrunch.com)
Google: App Engine on Parallel Bars Goes for Gold (arnoldit.com)
Brian Mastenbrook: How I cross-site scripted Twitter in 15 minutes, and why you shouldn’t store important data on 37signals’ applications (stevensreeves.posterous.com)

http://friendfeed.com/dpritchett Daniel J. Pritchett

Please excuse the video, it's taking YouTube over an hour to process 90 seconds of me talking. Don't worry, it's mostly the same stuff as I wrote out in the post.
http://friendfeed.com/benhedrington Ben Hedrington

Thanks for the http://spy.appspot.com link Daniel, did you ever check out my second tool http://www.retweetradar.com/… App Engine rules…
http://friendfeed.com/dpritchett Daniel J. Pritchett

I've not seen this second one, Ben. Do you publish any of your source code, maybe open source this stuff? I'm going to need a good foothold if I aim to learn Python and Django and GAE all at once…
http://friendfeed.com/benhedrington Ben Hedrington

I am going to just haven't done it yet. Currently sharing spy with mjc, he's adding some feature ideas. What types of things are you trying to do, I can probably send something to help.
http://friendfeed.com/dpritchett Daniel J. Pritchett

I don't really have an app planned yet, I'm just trying to brush up. The last standalone app I built was a proof of concept in PHP that pulled some text out of some MySQL DBs and rendered it as HTML. I've not used any exciting frameworks like Django, really.
http://friendfeed.com/benhedrington Ben Hedrington

I'll fire something over for inspiration, not perfect or clean but it works!
http://friendfeed.com/dpritchett Daniel J. Pritchett

You rock, Ben!
http://friendfeed.com/benhedrington Ben Hedrington

Should be in your gmail…
http://friendfeed.com/benhedrington Ben Hedrington

It's all fun and in the same vein as you are I do this to “sharpen my POV and build my context” as I say on the blog… Follow my further App Engine explorations here: http://www.buildcontext.com/blog/ Working on a new rev for http://retweetradar.com this weekend here -> http://www.retweetradar.com/beta
http://friendfeed.com/dpritchett Daniel J. Pritchett

Wow Ben, that's a great list. I've just gotten spy up and running on my PC. I started with a vanity search and it's working already… the only thing I had to do was move it out of usersdanieldownloads…spy which failed for some reason
http://friendfeed.com/benhedrington Ben Hedrington

Hope it leads you somewhere cool… probably seem a bit more complex than what you wanted to start… peel it back to one template and pipe in some API output in can already process many you'll figure out how it works. Have fun.
http://friendfeed.com/benhedrington Ben Hedrington

Big oddity (for most people) about spy is it is all real time, nothing saved to the datastore so you won't see any examples of that.
http://friendfeed.com/dpritchett Daniel J. Pritchett

Just polls APIs and writes directly to the screen?
http://friendfeed.com/benhedrington Ben Hedrington

Polls APIs, combines, memcaches results (incase others what that data within X minutes) serves via JSON. jQuery picks up the JSON as needed from the browser end.
http://friendfeed.com/dpritchett Daniel J. Pritchett

Man, I'm out of the loop when it comes to modern web programming. A guy on my team builds some JSON stuff to serve a dynamic new UI for us but I've only used it, not built it. Luckily it looked dead simple.
http://friendfeed.com/benhedrington Ben Hedrington

Experimentation is the key to learning… Don't try to do it all tonight!

Get started building your own web apps with the Google App Engine

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