New Tools for Google App Engine Add Some Major Functionality

Recently at Google IO, there were a lot of announcements on new products and services ranging from tablets to music and movie services. Along with those were some less advertised enhancements to the App Engine platform that were discussed in the breakout sessions. These enhancements don’t have the wow factor of the announcements from the keynotes, but if you’re a cloud developer, they’re pretty cool.

The first feature I’m referring to is App Engine Backends. As you know, most cloud development environments are limited in numerous ways to ensure that one application does not use all the resources of a shared environment. App Engine Backends provide some relief to this issue by eliminating many of the limits applied to a standard App Engine instance. They allow an application to use up to 1GB of memory and 4.8GHz of CPU. They also have no request deadlines. They can run for an unlimited amount of time to provide major processing power for applications that need to chug through large amounts of data or calculations. They are still App Engine instances at heart, so they can be configured to start up dynamically when needed, just like regular instances. Also like regular instances, you only pay for what you use. To find out more and view the breakout session, check out http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/sessions/app-engine-backends.html.

Another feature I was excited to see was Google’s Full Text Search service for App Engine. Google is most famous for their search, so why isn’t it natively available for App Engine? Well, in the near future, it will be. It includes many of the bells and whistles you would expect from Google’s Search Engine, including wildcard and advance search. It will also include numeric, geo location, and date search abilities. By simply adding a couple lines of code to your application, you will be able to create a very robust search. Future iterations will even allow for REST API access. Check it out at: http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/sessions/full-text-search.html.

The last feature I want to mention is the Google Plugin for Eclipse. This is a feature rich plugin that brings many of the tools Java developers are used to in a local environment for cloud development. There is one click deployment to App Engine, GWT integration for Ajax development, a UI designer, as well as the ability to bring any of the Google API’s into your project with just a couple clicks. Tools like this make the move from traditional development to cloud development much easier for developers. You can download and see all the details here: http://code.google.com/eclipse/.

Google IO was filled with exciting news for consumers and developers alike. You can check out all the announcements and events at http://www.google.com/io