YouTube APIs + App Engine = YouTube Direct

When choosing a platform to power a new application that will be used by popular media sites, some of the criteria we look for are scalability, ease of deployment, and ease of management. As with the nature of news and media, traffic can go up and down without much warning and getting new content out of the door quickly is the name of the game. App Engine has greatly simplified development and deployment of YouTube Direct, a new tool built on YouTube's open APIs that allows media organizations to request, review, and re-broadcast user-submitted videos by embedding the upload functionality of YouTube directly into their own sites. By using the Google Plugin for Eclipse to "click and deploy" new code changes and App Engine's admin console to manage application data, our launch partners -- most of which had never used App Engine before -- were able to easily deploy their own instances of YouTube Direct.

To date, media organizations like The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, The Huffington Post and ABC's Good Morning America are using YouTube Direct powered by App Engine's Java runtime and we hope more organizations take advantage of the platform. Visit YouTube Direct's developer page to learn more about it. The project's source is also available on Google Code.

Guest post by Amanda Surya, YouTube Direct team

Community Update: deferred, open source, and more

Here are some of the recent developments from the greater developer community.

deferred.defer

Nick Johnson recently added a new module to the App Engine Python SDK which allows you to use the task queue service to execute deferred function calls. This library requires minimal configuration and makes it even easier to use tasks. Using it is as simple as calling deferred.defer with the function and arguments you want to call - for example:

from google.appengine.ext import deferred
deferred.defer(logging.info, "In a deferred task")

For more details, see the article.

Ruby as a runtime option

The JRuby App Engine project has done a lot of work making spin-up time less painful with the most recent release. They've also had some great contributions from the growing community, such as an Image API that is ImageScience compatible. Ruby programmers can now build applications using familiar tools like Sinatra and DataMapper, while having access to the full set of App Engine APIs for Java. Follow future developments on the jruby-appengine blog and watch for talks by the JRuby App Engine team at upcoming conferences: "Scaling on App Engine with Ruby and Duby" at RubyConf and "JRuby on Google App Engine" at JRubyConf.

An open source alternate environment: TyphoonAE

Open source efforts to provide alternate hosting environments for App Engine applications continue to expand, with the TyphoonAE project joining the existing AppScale project in providing a platform to run App Engine apps. TyphoonAE aims to provide a complete environment for hosting App Engine apps, and so far includes compatible datastore, memcache, task queue and XMPP implementations.

gae-query-pager

Juraj recently created and open sourced a library for the Java runtime which "generate[s] appropriate paging queries from a base query, and then using these queries to page through the data." This is intended to simplify iteration through all of the results in a very large result set.

AEJ Tools

If you love RESTful APIs then it would be worth your while to take a look at AEJ Tools. Their library provides "a server module which provides a Rest style access to your datastore data, and a client module which allows you to run queries remotely using the Groovy interactive console. It can be used to run queries, store new entities or as a data import/export tool."

An open source full text search library

The datastore related libraries just keep right on coming. Full text search is a highly requested feature for App Engine and those behind the open source appengine-search project have create a Python library which "[c]an defer indexing via Task Queue API. Uses Relation index strategy mentioned in Brett Slatkin's Google I/O talk."

Testing framework

Moving beyond the datastore, the developers at geewax have created an advanced testing framwork called GAE Testbed. It covers everything from isolated and quick unit tests to full scale end to end tests and builds on some of the great testing tools for App Engine which are already avilable.

Party Chat

In other news, the folks at techwalla have migrated their party chat app to App Engine and made the source code available. It uses the new XMPP API to simulate a chat room using your favorite XMPP client. You can read more specifics on their blog.

Other open source projects

Check out the open source projects wiki page for more open source App Engine applications and utilities. Since the last posting, nearly 15 new applications have been added, so keep checking in as new projects are added regularly. If you have a project of your own to add, just follow the instructions at the bottom of the same page.

That's brings our community update to a close. We're always interested in hearing about new and interesting projects which use App Engine. If you have something to share, drop us a line.

Posted by Jeff Scudder, App Engine Team

Audrey Roy Wins the App Engine + Twilio Developer Contest

Congratulations to Audrey Roy -- her "Price It By Phone" application won the Google App Engine + Twilio developer contest that ran from September 21st to October 4th. Audrey will receive $1000 in Google App Engine credit, and a Dell Netbook from Twilio.

Audrey hacked together her contest submission in under 48 hours after going to an art museum and discovering that the $60 box she wanted was only $37 on Amazon.com. She used the Amazon Product Advertising API to look up the best used and new prices for books by ISBN number, using any touch tone phone.

Look up Amazon.com book prices by calling (877) 265-8137. Enter the book's 10-digit ISBN number after the prompt. The voice will tell you Amazon.com's lowest new and used prices for the book. Then, to see the list of books that you've already price-checked, with links to their Amazon detail pages, enter your phone number at http://price-it.appspot.com.

You can find an interview of Audrey on Twilio's blog.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the contest.

Twilio runs weekly developer contests to encourage developers to explore the many use cases, technologies, and industries where voice applications can provide useful solutions. They announce a new category each Monday along with the previous week's winner. This week's category is "Twilio for Salesforce, with Appirio" and the deadline is midnight on November 19th.

Questions? Drop us a line at help@twilio.com

Guest Post by Danielle Morrill, Director of Marketing, Twilio

Task Queue Quota Increases

Since the Task Queue API launched in June, we've been thrilled with how many developers have started using the API. Many developers have asked for more quota so that they can better utilize the API within their apps. We're pleased that we can now address these requests by significantly increasing the Task Queue quotas and are happy to announce the following changes, effective from today:

• Free quota increased from 10K to 100K task insertions per day.
• For billing enabled apps, quota increased from 100K to 1M (one million) task insertions per day.
• Total execution rate (across all queues for a given app) increased from 10 to 20 task invocations per second.

Stay tuned for more enhancements to the Task Queue system in the coming months.

Find App Engine news and content at reddit

We're pleased to announce that you can now submit and comment on App Engine news and articles on a new App Engine specific section of the popular social media site, reddit. Our subreddit is for any articles, blog posts, or other content relevant to App Engine, and is actively moderated and maintained by the App Engine team. Registration takes seconds and allows you to submit, vote, and comment on new App Engine content. The top articles, as selected by the App Engine community, are shown in a widget on http://code.google.com/appengine/.

Be sure to check us out on the App Engine reddit - http://reddit.com/r/appengine

Posted by Nick Johnson, App Engine Team

App Engine SDK 1.2.7 - Bugfix Release for Python

Due to two issues introduced in the 1.2.6 release of the Python SDK, we are releasing version 1.2.7 today. This is a bugfix-only release with just a few minor changes (no new features or functionality); all users of App Engine for Python should upgrade to the new version, available on our Downloads page.

The two issues were:

• The 1.2.6 release added a key argument to the Model class constructor that broke subclasses who were calling the constructor's private arguments with positional (not named) values. The fix is to restore the original ordering, and require that the new key argument be specified as a named argument only.
• The 1.2.6 release broke an interaction between remote_api and the local development app server.

Both are now fixed in 1.2.7.

There is no corresponding release for the Java language version of App Engine (the Java SDK remains at 1.2.6).

App Engine SDK 1.2.6 Released with Incoming Email, App Deletion, and more!

The App Engine team is psyched to present version 1.2.6 of our SDK for both runtimes, Python and Java. This releases contains plenty of improvements and bugfixes, along with some exciting new features:

Incoming Email - Your App Engine app has been able to send email for some time ... but now, with 1.2.6, your app can also receive email. After enabling mail as an inbound service (just like XMPP), users can email your application at whatever@yourappid.appspotmail.com. Inbound messages are converted to HTTP requests (again, just like XMPP) which you can receive via webhook handler. Docs for Python, Java.

Delete an App - Our developers have been quite vocal with their desire to delete an App Engine application once it is no longer used (It's one of the top 5 most requested features on our issue tracker). Well, this feature is now available via the Admin Console! Just visit the Application Settings page for more information. Please be careful when deleting an app - the appid can never be reused after deletion. Learn more.

Datastore Stats - You can now see more detailed statistics about how your application data is stored in the Admin Console. This information can also be accessed programmatically. Docs for Python, Java.

More details can be found in the Release Notes. To download the new SDK and get coding, please visit the Downloads page.