Mastering Google App Engine

About This Book

• Get an in-depth look at how Google App Engine works under the hood
• Design and model your application around Google’s highly scalable distributed NoSQL datastore to unlock its full potential
• A comprehensive guide to ensure your mastery of Google App Engine

Who This Book Is For

If you have been developing web applications in Python or any other programming language such as PHP, Ruby or Java but have always wondered how to write highly scalable web applications without getting into system administration and other plumbing, then this is the book for you.

What You Will Learn

• Develop and scale your applications on top of Google App Engine’s runtime environment
• Get firm grip of the Google App Engine’s request handling mechanism and write request handlers
• Dive deep into Google’s distributed NoSQL, highly scalable datastore and design your application around it
• Implement powerful search functionality backed with a scalable datastore
• Perform long-running tasks in the background using task queues
• Write compartmentalized apps using multi tenancy, memcache, and other Google App Engine runtime services
• Deploy, tweak, and manage apps in production on Google App Engine

In Detail

Google App Engine allows you to develop highly scalable web applications or backends for mobile applications without worrying about system administration plumbing or hardware provisioning issues. Just focus on writing your business logic, the meat of the application, and let Google’s powerful infrastructure scale it to thousands of requests per second and millions of users without any effort on your part.

Starting with a walkthrough of what scalability is and how scalable web applications work, this book introduces you to the environment under which your applications operate on Google App Engine. Next, you will learn about Google’s datastore which is a massively scalable distributed NoSQL solution built on top of BigTable.

After that, we will show you how to implement powerful search functionality backed by datastore. Finally, you will be presented with the deployment and monitoring of your applications in production along with a detailed look at dividing applications into different working modules. You’ll also learn how to execute long running tasks in background using queues.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Understanding the Runtime Environment
Chapter 2. Handling Web Requests
Chapter 3. Understanding the Datastore
Chapter 4. Modeling Your Data
Chapter 5. Queries, Indexes, and Transactions
Chapter 6. Integrating Search
Chapter 7. Using Task Queues
Chapter 8. Reaching out, Sending E-mails
Chapter 9. Working with the Google App Engine Services
Chapter 10. Application Deployment