The Dashboard in Google App Engine advises:

Use appcfg.py to upload applications from your computer to Google App Engine

The URL it directs you to: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/appcfgpy.html which returns a 404 Not Found

Use http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/tools/uploadinganapp.html instead

Brandon Nutter reports:

Every once in a while, we invite members of the developer community to visit Mountain View campus to talk shop, share news, and eat Google'sS'mores. We call these events "Google Campfire One," and we held a lively one tonight.

At tonight's Campfire One we announced some developer tools that we think will be pretty interesting to businesses: a new release of Google App Engine and the Google Secure Data Connector (SDC). Enterprise developers and IT professionals have been asking for tools like these to add custom applications to Google Apps and to connect Google Apps with their existing IT systems.

App Engine already lets Google Apps customers build apps just for their users. The new features make it even easier to build and deploy business apps that integrate with Google Apps, and SDC gives enterprises a way to help connect their firewalled data to their Google Apps domain. Ten other companies, including Oracle™ and IBM™, participated in tonight's Campfire One to announce new apps and services incorporating these tools.

Cron, Java^TM, and GWT for App Engine

Based on developer feedback, we've added several features to App Engine, including the ability to schedule tasks to run automatically (cron) and new database import/export tools to simplify moving gigabytes of data into/out of App Engine.

We also announced an early look at App Engine's support for the Java language. We made this standards-based so Java developers can build apps with familiar APIs and move them to other application servers if the need arises. In fact, tonight's Campfire showcased IBM's demo of moving an app to IBM Websphere with just a few code changes (we're giving 10,000 interested developers an early look at our Java language support, so test it out and send feedback).

We've also integrated App Engine with the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and the Eclipse IDE so developers will be able write their apps from end-to-end in the Java language in a single IDE. During the Campfire, Appirio™, a Google Apps solution provider, showed how App Engine plus GWT and the Google Visualization API let them quickly write and deploy a complete recruiting management app without setting up servers or dealing with cross-browser compatibility.

Encrypted connection to firewalled data

We also talked about giving developers who work on cloud-based business apps access to behind-the-firewall data – previously a difficult issue to tackle. To help solve this problem, we built the Google Secure Data Connector (SDC), a downloadable agent which lets IT admins connect Google Apps to resources behind the firewall.

Today, you can use SDC with gadgets in Google Sites, App Engine applications, and spreadsheets in Google Docs. As part of tonight's event, Oracle showed how Oracle CRM gadgets will let their customers interact with sales and customer information from within Google Apps.

Several other companies announced support for SDC in their products tonight. Cast Iron Systems has added built-in support for SDC to their integration appliance, allowing Google Apps to integrate with hundreds of different systems through a point-and-click interface. Panorama Software has added support for SDC to their gadgets, allowing you to visualize and analyze business data right in the browser. ThoughtWorks™, Cloud Sherpas™, Sword Group™, Ping Identity™, and PivotLink™ also participated in this Campfire One event. You can learn more about their announcements on our Campfire One participants page.

You can visit Google Code to learn more about our developer tools, and if you're a developer, be sure to come to Google I/O in San Francisco, California, on May 27-28th.

By the way, we shared the highlights of tonight's Campfire real-time on Twitter. Visit us there at http://twitter.com/googleatwork to see the current stream.

>Original Article

Reuven Cohen reports:

Big news coming out of Google today. They have announced some new upcoming features to the Google App Engine platform. There really hasn't been much news coming out of the Google App Engine lately, so todays news is all the more exciting.

First up is a feature they're describing as a Downtime Notify Google Group, which is a dashboard to announce scheduled downtime and explain any issues that affect App Engine applications. This is similar to other trouble dashboards such as Amazon's.

The more interesting feature is that of the Quota Details Dashboard which enables a granular utilization view for each Google App Engine application. In case you've never used Google App Engine, one of the more unique aspects of the system is found within its use of a set of resource quotas that control how much CPU, Bandwidth, and storage space a Google App can consume. Currently all of this usage is free but in the future, developers will be allowed to purchase additional usage beyond these free quotas. Until today, potential customers of the system haven't had a real pricing model outlined beyond some vague pricing details. So it's been rather difficult to actually model a business on Google App Engine.

Google shed some light on the subject today, according to a blog post;

"You'll be able to buy capacity based on a daily budget for your app, similar to the way AdWords spending works. You'll have fine-grained control over this daily budget so you can apply it across CPU, network bandwidth, disk storage, and email as you see fit. You'll only pay for the resources your app actually uses, not to exceed the budget you set."

What I find the most interesting about all this new is Google's use of a Quota system for a tiered billing of cloud resources. In this quota model Google can attract a large user base by offering a "free" frictionless entry, while the more successful applications may choose to pay for enhanced services via Fixed or Per Day usage quotas. In my opinion this very well may be the first step in the creation of a true commodity based exchange of computing services and capacity.

In a post on GigaOm earlier today Allistair Croll said that "Google is carefully launching an ecosystem for developers to build and sell their cloud-based software." I did some digging on the subject, but other then Croll's comments, I couldn't find anything concrete on the subject coming from anyone at Google. But it does make sense, recent reports indicate that there is a market emerging around Google Apps with more then 10 million active users as well as signing up some 3,000 new companies a day, according to Matthew Glotzbach, product management director of Google Enterprise. So it would seem Google App Engine might be the ideal tool to power Google's emerging cloud application ecosystem. Think along the lines of a Cloud Application Marketplace. It’s the same basic concept Facebook did with its API or Salesforce did with AppExchange; in Google’s case, users may now have a global turnkey channel that can reach small businesses easily. Very cool.

I for one am looking forward to seeing how this all plays out.

 

>Original article