Thursday, December 2, 2010

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.

45 comments:

Eurig Jones said...

Always On feature sounds fantastic. Congrats GAE team, this is great news.

Anton said...

Awesome. Congrats GAE team!

Araminos said...

Great. What about datastore 1mb limit? I prepeared my project to release, but I need more space to persist. Now, I have to split big object by parts and persist only this way.

PhistucK said...

Great! Thank you very much, but... what about updating the documentation? How to use the Channel API, for example...

Vitriolix said...

Huge news, I've been waiting for the channel api forever.

Unknown said...

Awesome features. Browser channels and 10 minute cron jobs are huge!

Unknown said...

Docs for the Channel API are live!
Python: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/channel/

Java: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/channel/

Unknown said...

Docs for Channel API: Java | Python

Docs for Always On

Adam Sah said...

this is a GREAT holiday gift. Thank you!

federico silva said...

Super! Excellent new, guys. Thanks!

DF said...

Link to more detailed release notes: http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/wiki/SdkReleaseNotes

Gary Rudolph said...

Fantastic news! Although, was hoping we could have configured the URL for /_ah/warmup

erolagnab said...

Sad, no updates for mail API implementation. Lots of obvious bugs ...

Unknown said...

This is incredible! Can't wait to take the weekend to port our half-finished app to GAE.

I was skeptical at first, but now I'm convinced!

Jack said...

Cool, and when we can have the plan for "App engine for business"?

thanks.

Sudhir Jonathan said...

Awesome news :D Happy holidays to every one of you on the team. I think you guys have earned it.

nixarn said...

Thanks! Awesome update and happy holidays to you too!

♫gaurav♫ said...

Man... this is awesome!

pellepim said...

Channel API just went live! YEEEEEES.

Florian d'Erfurth said...

Awesome :D
I've never been so exited about an SDK ;)

George Moschovitis said...

Great release but we want more! How about better support for JPA/JDO?

Amos Yoffe said...

Awesome news, been waiting for some of these features for a long time. Great work GAE team, you're building a very viable service here. I believe platform-as-a-service is the next step after infrastructure-as-a-service.

un|marco said...

thank you for the awesome work guys and happy holidays to you too!

chumbly said...

Always on is the feature I need for my Apps - I will try it and if as good as I believe then I will produce a raft of App -> App Engine.

(the slight delay in App Engine response worried me before)

:)

Unknown said...

Channel is just a polling mechanism ;-(

Why channel is not a real websocket ?
It's for compatibility issues ?
Because specs are not finnished ?
Is there a way to force websocket when we target a modern browser ?

Margus Martsepp said...

I am elated.

sanatgersappa said...

Could not figure out a way to use App Launcher with the 2 factor authentication enabled on my account. Had to disable it in order to upload my app.

JohnJ said...

Awesome news. Is there an ETA for the Eclipse plugin to be upgraded to GAE SDK 1.4?

HumbleBee said...

Good job GAE team!! However, can you also increase the size of Task Object to something that makes sense? 10kb of task object, I don't know what exactly I can store in there, like 2 integers?

Gregory Pierce said...

Always On and the Channels API mean that App Engine finally becomes useful for my applications!

snowy909 said...

This is great news , marks another evolutionary step for App Engine.
Congratulations !

Jim Ramia said...

Awesome! Love the new features!

Mamun said...

Love the channel feature.. Thanks

Unknown said...

And what about the compatibility of the Channel API with the dev server? Is it possible or will be possible in near future?

Gopi said...

Wow.. "Always On" the most awaited feature. Congrats GAE team and all GAE users :)

anaik said...

Awesome job, GAE team!! Great work!

Kurtis Harms said...

Thank you so much for the Channel API! I can finally build a web app that I have envisioned for a long time.

Satish Varier said...

With these critical enhancements and freshly released features, the application developers can address a whole new range of use cases. I believe the celebration time on GAE has just begun ahead of the Season !

Ronoaldo Pereira said...

Great news!!!

franxx said...

great job. !!!!

Fredo said...

The Always ON feature is THE feature I need for my critical application (related to alert mangment) ! This framework takes the good way !

Chris Larson said...

Thank you! Great release!

Unknown said...

Fantastic job.
Congrats.

Dagvadorj said...

Hello guys,

Good work here!

Does Google have any strategy about making webapp framework official, i mean like Django, so that apps written using webapp can be deployed on ones own server?

Unknown said...

Channel API is cool, but the client API is only available for Javascript.

Would be great if you could provide a Java/Android version of the client (to easily create awesome multiplayer android games !)