Google App Engine 1.5: What’s new

The first day of Google I/O 2011 is over and Google has already released updates to bunch of its products. Google App Engine is no exception to that. Google App Engine got upgraded to 1.5 with some interesting features. This upgrade is mainly focused on the maintenance aspect of your applications. New features are being introduced to ease the maintenance process and build a better application infrastructure. A new runtime for Go Programming Language has also been introduced.

Highlights:

• Backends:  Now, you can write applications which can run for a longer duration of time. Backends are developer-controlled, long-running, addressable sets of instances which are as large as the developer specifies. There are no request deadlines, they can be started and stopped (or dynamically start when called), they can use between 128M and 1G of memory and proportional CPU. With this, you can think about creating applications like reporting, etc.
• Pull Queues: Now the applications can pull tasks from the queue whenever it is ready to process. Pull Queues linked with Backends will be really handy for batch processing.
• Go runtime: The third official programming language to be supported by Google App Engine. An experimental runtime for Go Programming Language has also been bundled with 1.5 upgrade. Not sure how many developers are actually using Go (Of course, some Googlers will be using it).
• HTTP response size: HTTP request and response size has been upgraded to 32 MB.
• Apart from the owners, the users who have uploaded the code can also download it from the admin console.
• Google App Engine is going to be graduated from Preview later this year. Check out the new pricing model once it goes live.

For more details, check out the official blog post.

-- Varun

Google App Scripts for Google Sites

If you are using Google Sites for your Public or Intranet sites, here is an awesome news for you. Google has enabled Google App Scripts for Google Sites. Google App Scripts, which is 1.5 years young can be used to automate business processes that involve multiple applications. This will be very handy if you are running a small business and want to setup the infrastructure needed for your company. You can setup multi-step workflows using the Google App scripts.

Google’s Cloud language

Google App Script, which was originally launched to automate tasks (macros) on Google Docs Spreadsheet, is a server side JavaScript that executes on the Google’s Cloud. Almost all the Google’s services can be accessed using Google App Scripts. Though Google App Scripts are not widely used yet, they have got so much of potential on the Cloud. Some of the popular services of Google App Script includes Calendar, Contacts, Mail, DocsList, Spreadsheet, URLFetch, etc. Google is also experimenting UI services using which you can create applications which interact with the users via rich graphical interfaces. Another interesting addition to the list of services is the JDBC service using which you can write JDBC queries to pull data from any of your data servers. (Supports only MySQL for now). Read more about Google App Scripts here.

Google App Script for Google Sites

To create a new script, go to More Actions > Manage Site > App Scripts. Click on the Launch Editor option to open the editor where in you can write your scripts. Launch editor will compile and check your script for errors. Once your script is saved successfully, you can add links from your page to trigger these functions. App scripts serve as a perfect back end for all your site operations.

Follow Google App Scripts blog to keep yourself updated on the happenings in the space. If you are new to Google App Scripts, check out this tutorial. I have created a working copy of the same on my sample site.

-- Varun