New features and an early look at Java for App Engine

Scarcity brings clarity, and many companies are taking important steps to adjust to today's economic climate. At Google, we've started changing the way we build and release products.

In the past six months alone we've launched nearly 50 projects and small products on Google App Engine -- from Google Moderator and Labs for Google Apps to internal-facing tools for both our Ads and Web teams. In all cases we found it quicker, easier, and more cost-effective to leave the infrastructure to App Engine, and the actual product-building to our engineering teams.

Running our internal and external apps on App Engine isn't without difficulty, however, and we've learned a lot in the process. Tonight at Campfire One we released a new set of features -- based on community and internal feedback -- that helps App Engine interface more easily with businesses' existing technologies:

• App Engine's early look at Java™ language support includes a Java runtime, integration with the new Google Web Toolkit 1.6, and a Google Plugin for Eclipse
• The Google Secure Data Connector enables centrally-managed access to on-premise data from Google Apps
• The database import tool makes it easier to move gigabytes of data into App Engine (and export functionality is coming within the month)
• Cron support can execute scheduled tasks like report generation and DB clean-up at regular intervals

By reducing the administrative headaches that come with scaling and distributing an application, we hope that App Engine will continue to let developers do what they do best: launch services that delight users.

Take a look at videos from tonight's Campfire One below:



To learn more about Google App Engine or today's announcements, feel free to check out the Google Code Blog or online docs. You can also register for our annual developer conference, Google I/O, as the App Engine team will be there to answer any questions you might have, as well as unveil a few surprises.

Java is a trademark or registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries.

Update at 10:44 pm PDT: We've just added the videos from tonight's Campfire One.

Posted by Kevin Gibbs, Tech Lead, Google App Engine