[TriLUG] Google App Engine Hack-a-Thon?

[Daniel Sterling]

Would Trilugers be interested in a Google App Engine Hack-a-Thon? If
there's enough interest, Google is offering to host an event at their
Chapel-Hill office, sometime this or next month.

Google's App Engine (documented at
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/ ) allows you to write a web
application that runs on Google's systems. You write your application
(currently using Python), upload it to Google, and it's live. You can
sign up and deploy applications with no charge (currently, you're not
allowed to exceed bandwidth/CPU usage quotas).

The really nifty part is that GAE allows you to work with Google's
BigTable database system. Referred to by the GAE documentation as the
DataStore, this is no ordinary DBMS; you don't create a pre-defined
relational schema with SQL to use it. Instead, you define models right
in your code, populate them with data, and send them to the DataStore.
For retrieval, you can use either an entity's unique key, or retrieve
all records, filtered and ordered via pre-defined indexes. The
DataStore supports transactions with automatic retry, and
automatically handles redundancy and partitioning. In other words, you
can write a really scalable app without sweating all the hard details
(you just have to make sure your model makes sense :)

App Engine also has several other userful APIs, including integration
with Google's user service and support for Django templates. It's also
possible to use other Python web frameworks (minus their usual RDBMS
hooks).

So, email back if you're interested in getting together to discuss and
hack on code for GAE projects. (I do not work for Google, I just bug
people who do:)

Thanks,
Dan Sterling