Technology - Google App Engine

This experiment involves technology. I happen to be a web developer. However the platforms I am using for this experiment are relatively new to me. In this technology post I'll give an brief overview of how I am using Google's App Engine platform.

Google App Engine is the new web application platform from google. In fact it is still called "preview" or beta. It is all about scalable systems. My web application is running on the same scalable systems that power google applications. So when I get every web entrepreneur's dream come true, a link from some high traffic website, my web application will not fall over. And best of all it's free! Well there are quotas for everything, but to start with they are more than what I need. And I only have a couple of mostly static pages for now, the front page and the thank you page. They are still going through the simplest of python controllers but other than that they do nothing else.

Of course App Engine comes complete with a presentation framework and integration api's for managing data, user accounts, sending emails and manipulating images among others. And of course it's extensible because after all it's just a python program. I'm not using any of this yet, but when this experiment moves to a more interesting phase I will have to make use of these features.

Getting my web application up and running was pretty trivial. I followed the super easy getting started tutorial and that was way more than I needed for the Spend One Million Dollars website.


All that was left was to buy the domain through google apps and configure it to point to my SOMD App Engine web application. And it comes with automated version management of major/minor releases.