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Yesterday I gave a presentation on Google App Engine for a small group of people at Capgemini. I talked about my experiences so far and highlighted the main features of App Engine. I've published the slides on Google Docs, maybe it helps you to start with App Engine.

I've published a small update for Engine Watch that fixes login problems that some of you are experiencing. Big thanks to Alvin Wang for testing this on his Droid!

Market barcode and more details are in this post

More updates to Engine Watch, my Android app to list the quotas of your Google App Engine application!
This version adds a few things:

First of all, Engine Watch will now use your configured Google accounts, if you are running Android 2.0 or up _and_ you have the Google Account options in the accounts and sync settings. This way you don't have to enter and store your password in Engine Watch, which makes it easier to set up, and more secure. Thanks to Justin from Google for helping me test this, as my Hero still runs on Android 1.5.

Secondly you can now create an Engine Watch shortcut on the home screen for a specific application, which saves you a few clicks because you don't have to select the account and application first.

Finally this version also adds the details for the billing details, if you have billing enabled for your app. Just use the menu option from the quota screen.

Here's the barcode:

Or search for Engine Watch in the Android market.

Hope you like it!

I've published a small update to Engine Watch. This version fixes a crash when trying to show quotas for an app that isn't deployed. It should now also be working on the HTC Tatoo and other small screen devices.

I've added a little feature to open the "normal" app engine console from the quota screen. Just use the menu and select "dashboard".

See this post for more info and the market barcode.

I've just released my second free Android app, called Engine Watch. Engine Watch is a small utility that I wrote to monitor the quotas of my application on the Google App Engine cloud. Multiple accounts can be added and for each account you can select the application and get the current quota statistics, the same statistics you can see on the App Engine dashboard.

You can download engine watch by scanning this barcode:

or by searching for Engine Watch in the market. Let me know what you think!

For Rainy Days I needed something to process the weather data that gets sent to the Android device, because some of the processing is simply to much for a mobile device. Since I had played around Google App Engine already I picked it as my PaaS of choice, besides I didn't feel like mucking around with virtual servers on AWS anyway :)

Because I already had invested in some Java code that I also use on the client, and my python isn't that fluent yet, I decided to run Java on appengine. My initial app was just a simple servlet, but I soon got fed up with all of the cruft related to that so I used Gaelyk as a lightweight framework. It allows me to code my "servlets" as groovlets, which are just plain groovy scripts, hook up my existing Java code and write new code either as Groovy or Java classes. It also adds some nice shortcuts for appengine, like accessing memcache like a normal map.

The things I like about app engine so far:

• The dashboard is great! It shows statistics on specific urls which is just what I need for my usecase. It has a clear overview of quota's.
• Logviewer is very nice, although the times could be localized to my timezone (come on Google, you know where I live by now :))
• Deployment from within Eclipse is very smooth, and to be able to run multiple versions of your app is great for testing.

The biggest thing that I don't like is: start up time for the Java vm. It simply takes too long, and has been blogged about here. Aparently it should get better when my app will get more load on it, but at the moment some requests take up almost 6 seconds just to serve up a "304 not modified" response. This startup time also adds to the total time allowed per request which isn't helping. The precompilation option does seems to help however and aparently they are working on it at Google.

One other thing to consider is that you should deploy often. The development server doesn't always emulate the real cloud perfectly and somethings will not work on the cloud while they work perfectly on your local environment and vice versa. This has bitten me a few times already.

All in all it has been a fairly positive experience so far. I might still take the plunge and rewrite my app in python if the start up time keeps being an issue, but I rather not :)