Happy Holidays from the App Engine team - 1.4.0 SDK released

App Engine version 1.4.0. is here! It’s our most significant release of the year for the App Engine SDK, including a number of very big features that we know developers have been eagerly awaiting:

• The Channel API - A bi-directional channel for communicating directly with user browsers by pushing notifications directly to the JavaScript running on the client, eliminating the need for polling. This service makes it easy to build real-time applications such as multi-player games, chat rooms, or any collaboration centric app and is built on the same Google infrastructure that powers Google Talk.
• Always On - For high-priority applications with low or variable traffic, you can now reserve instances via App Engine's Always On feature. Always On is a premium feature costing $9 per month which reserves three instances of your application, never turning them off, even if the application has no traffic. This mitigates the impact of loading requests on applications that have small or variable amounts of traffic.

Screenshot of the Instances page in the App Engine Admin Console with Always On enabled.

• Warm Up Requests - This feature reduces time to serve requests by anticipating the need for more instances and loading them before user traffic is sent to the new instance. It can be enabled for all applications through app.yaml or appengine-web.xml and is enabled by default for applications that have purchased Always On. Once enabled, warm up requests will be sent whenever possible to load new instances of your application before it begins serving user traffic.

As well, we’ve spent a lot of time this release on reducing or removing the limitations of some of App Engine’s existing APIs

• No more 30-second limit for background work - With this release, we’ve significantly raised this limit for offline requests from Task Queue and Cron: you can now run for up to 10 minutes without interruption.
• Increased API Call Size Limits - A new API architecture has allowed us to start lifting the 1MB size limits on many of the App Engine APIs. To start, the following APIs have been changed:
  • Response size limits for URLFetch have been raised from 1MB to 32MB.
  • Memcache batch get/put can now also do up to 32MB requests.
  • Image API requests and response size limits have been raised from 1MB to 32MB.
  • Mail API outgoing attachments have been increased from 1MB to 10MB

As you can imagine, some of these changes drastically expand the scope of applications that can be easily built using App Engine so download the SDK while it’s hot!

Keep an eye out for more blog posts on how you can take advantage of the new features to build your apps very soon. And we’ve got a few more big features coming very soon, such as a High Replication Datastore, so keep an eye on the App Engine roadmap and stay tuned.

Posted by The App Engine Team Team