The App Engine Team’s trip to I/O 2010 (Recap & Videos)

This year’s Google I/O included a flurry of announcements and presentations for the App Engine team. Thanks to everyone who attended our sessions, stopped by the Sandbox, or came to meet the team at our office hours. It was great to meet all of you. For the App Engine developers out there that weren't able to make it out this year, we wanted to give you a quick recap on what you missed.

We opened up the first day’s keynote with App Engine’s very own Kevin Gibbs announcing App Engine for Business and doing a demo of the new Business Admin Console. There’s lots of great new features coming with App Engine for Business so if you missed the announcement, please read more about it and sign up to be a part of the preview. We also announced our work with VMWare to connect our development tools in order to allow developers to use SpringSource tools and Google Web Toolkit to build applications and deploy them on App Engine.

If you were watching the keynote, you might have missed the announcement that we released version 1.3.4 of the App Engine SDK which included a brand new bulkloader and experimental support for OpenID and OAuth. The Blobstore API is also no longer experimental and supports files up to 2GB in size.

In addition to all the high profile announcements in the keynote, we also hosted a number of great sessions about App Engine development for the rest of the conference. Thanks to the dedicated I/O organizers, videos of all the App Engine sessions are now available so anyone can watch them (with more to come in the next few days):

• Appstats - RPC instrumentation and optimizations for App Engine - Guido van Rossum went into detail on how to use Appstats, a new tool for App Engine developers which provides deep insight into why requests are slow and what they’re doing under the covers.
  
  
• Run corporate applications on Google App Engine? Yes we do - Ben Fried (Google’s CIO) and his team joined us to give an update on their progress of moving Google’s corporate applications to App Engine, the problems they ran into, and the success they had. They also announced that two of their apps are now being open sourced for anyone to use.
  
  
• Batch data processing with App Engine - Mike Aizatsky introduced Mapper, a new tool which allows App Engine developers which makes it simple to write code that is run over large datasets such as a Blobstore file or Datastore entities.
  
  
• Data migration in App Engine - Matthew Blain gave a complete introduction to the brand new Bulk Loader which shipped as part of App Engine’s 1.3.4 SDK. The session also provided a look into how to use the Bulk Loader with Java applications and ways to import complex data models from a number of different sources.
  
  
• What's hot in Java for App Engine - The same duo from last year’s introduction of the Java SDK, Don Schwarz and Toby Reyelts, were back again this year to give an update on the progress of the Java SDK. Performance optimizations, compatibility, and new APIs are all covered giving a peak under the hood for Java developers.
  
  
• Building high-throughput data pipelines with Google App Engine - Brett Slatkin reviewed the Task Queue and introduced a number of strategies used to improve the performance of applications doing very high volumes of task queue work. This session is based on lessons learned by Brett while building PubSubHubbub on App Engine.
  
  
• Testing techniques for Google App Engine - Max Ross argued the virtues of proper software testing and then went to detail on how to test your App Engine code properly and how to use App Engine to test all the rest of your code.
  
  
• Next gen queries - Alfred Fuller closed out the conference with a great overview of recent improvements to the Datastore query planner and the new types of queries that are possible, as well as a look at a few features on the horizon.

In addition to the linked session titles where you'll find the videos and slides, you can also find all videos in this YouTube playlist for App Engine I/O 2010 sessions.

There’s plenty of great information in all the presentations, so for those of you that missed, we highly recommend you watch the videos and read the slides. For everyone else that made it to I/O this year, thank you for making this year’s I/O a complete success. It’s incredibly energizing for us to see all your hard work, thoughtful questions, and great ideas on App Engine. We’re already excited to see what you all surprise us with at next year’s I/O!

By Sean Lynch, App Engine Team