I have been reading up on the documentation and following the associated Google Group for the App Engine. Along with the new language, I’m working out how to use the App Engine web application framework and the Django template system. The Django template system was rather easy to grasp because it is very similar to how I use XML/XSL for web page templates in Java.

For a test application, I’m building a dynamic blog that will have posts, articles, categories, tags, links, images, etc. It will use Django templates fully and will be integrated with stylesheets and selectable “themes”. Kind of like a mini wordpress system. It will have a management interface for configured “admins” and will use the App Engine datastore for all data. This should be enough of a project to allow me to fully utilize all the various aspects of the App Engine prior to starting a more serious work project that I have in mind.

I’ll keep you updated!

AppEngine is currently considered to be “beta”. The initial release is only available to the first 10,000 developers that signed up. I was able to snag one of the 10,000 beta slots and now have access to AppEngine. I have not yet downloaded their development environment. I currently do not know Python but I have developed applications over the last 22 years in at least 6 different programming languages. I have started to look at the basic Python syntax and it looks straightforward. I’ll write a couple of small Python apps and get a better feel for the capabilities prior to downloading the AppEngine development kit.

I think this has the potential to be big considering the AppEngine environment takes care of scalability and load balancing for you. Scalability is not easy to build into web applications but having a framework provide those capabilities and having Google’s scalable systems backing the environment will be enticing to many developers.

Check out Google’s own page covering “What is Google App Engine?” for all the details.