Taking Google App Engine for a test drive

There are always plenty of new and interesting technologies to experiment with, but you have to invest precious time in setting up your development environment before you can start taking your first, undignified steps with the code. After all of this, where do you deploy your new app to, without digging into your wallet and paying for some hosting? Today I took the Google App Engine for a test drive, and within 30 minutes, my application was live for the world to see, at no cost, and without the usual set-up woes. This post will outline the simple steps I took to launch an application on the Google App Engine.

Sign up

Get your name down quick, or you may have a while to wait: http://appengine.google.com/

Set up

A painless development set-up:

1. I installed Python
2. I installed the Google App Engine SDK
3. I added the pydev plugin to my Eclipse IDE, but any text editor would do the job
4. I added python to my Windows PATH environment variable, no need to add the Google App Engine as this is done during its install process.

Some files

I quickly ran through these simple steps to create a primitive application.

It works!

A quick line in the command prompt and my app was ready to view in my browser.

Some Code

That's the boring stuff, now all I had to do was write some code. I don't have any previous experience with Python, but the learning process was a breeze with a little help from Google's sample applications.

Its live!

One more line in the command prompt and my new app was live, that's it! So what did I build? A simple interface to the albums I have been listening to lately, pulling the data from the Last.fm XML webservices. You can take a look at www.zefer.co.uk.