Getting Started with Google App Engine

In an afternoon hands-on workshop, Chris Schalk and Ikai Lan from Google walked attendees through the process of creating a Google App Engine app. 250K developers are currently using App Engine to build and deploy apps to the cloud, and App Engine apps get 500 million page views per day.

App Engine developers can use a Python or Java environment. For Java developers, an App Engine Eclipse plug-in is available. With this environment, creating an app and deploying it to the cloud is a 3-step process that can be done in less than an hour.

The first step is to create an App Engine account. If you have a Gmail account, you can use these credentials to access App Engine. If you don't have a Gmail account, you can either create one or create a separate App Engine account.

Once you create an account, go to the main App Engine tutorial page at: https://sites.google.com/site/gdevelopercodelabs/app-engine From this page, developers have the option of following the Java or Python tutorials. Be sure to check out the tutorials to get more information on getting started with App Engine.

There are no setup fees to get started building App Engine apps, but developers are generally limited to 500 MB of storage and enough CPU and bandwidth to support arround 5 million page views per month. Anything above these constraints and charges may apply. Developers can control their resource limits, so they can stay within a development budget.

The slide deck for this presentation is available at: http://www.slideshare.net/cschalk/introducing-app-engine-for-business

Chris Schalk can be found on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/cschalk