Introduction to Google App Engine

Overview of App Engine and its major components, including an overview of the APIs the SDK provides, the underlying technologies App Engine is built on, and the public roadmap of features being worked on. (20 minutes)

A quick live presentation of the steps to building a simple application, starting from the default application skeleton and building a quick ToDo list tracker application. (20 minutes)

Get everyone with a laptop up to Python 2.5 and the latest version of the SDK (20 minutes – but really could vary from 2 minutes if everyone is prepared to longer if there are issues)

Copy the application skeleton, review all three files (app.yaml, index.yaml and main.py).

Run the default application skeleton in the development app server. (20 minutes)

Covers the steps required to tegister an application name to run the application under on appspot.com (10 minutes)

To follow along live with this part of the tutorial will require a cellphone and will be optional for those people that don’t want to upload their application at this time.

Cover in more detail the configuration of the application through the app.yaml file: (10 minutes)

- Static Files
- URI Dispatch
- Add static files to demo application

Modify demo application to use the Django templating system which is included in the SDK. (10 minutes)

Introduce user API and add login and logout to demo application, tie into templates. (10 minutes)

Introduce the datastore, including the differences from a relational database, how entities are stored and indexed, the db.Model class and the various properties that can be added to an entity. Also cover expando models which allow the dynamic addition of properties.

Add data store interface to demo application. (30 minutes)

Introduce the local SDK dashboard which allows inspecting and manipulating the local datastore and memcache.

Introduce the web application dashboard used to monitor applications that are deployed, including errors, warnigns, quotas, and request logs. (10 minutes)

Introduce the logging API and add logging to demo application. Upload application and view log entries via the dashboard. (10 minutes)

Introduce the memcache API and add to the demo application. Upload application and view performance difference via dashboard. (10 minutes)

Extra material if time permits, covers sharding entities to enable higher write throughput while still allowing fast reads. Unique indexes and sharding will also be used in techiniques to address paging through large numbers of items. (20 minutes)