In this post, you will learn about the platform and how to successfully launch applications. Throughout the series, we will be creating a fully functional web application written in Java and jQuery, which will monitor the performance of your website, and report downtime.
What is Google App Engine?
App Engine is Google’s platform for developing web applications that run on their infrastructure. This means high scalability, reliability, and speed. You only need to care about your code and rest assured that no matter the load, Google can take it.
There is also another great thing about this service – it offers a generous amount of resources for free. You can host a web app that could serve up to 5 million pageviews free of charge. If you outgrow the free quota, however, you will have to pay for your resource usage.
Applications on App Engine are built in either Python or Java. Python version 2.5 is supported, which is what we will be using in the series. App Engine provides a number of APIs for storing data, caching, cron jobs and more, that you can use in your apps. The daily quotas that apply to these services are high enough to be safely ignored for the application we are building in the series.
These resources will help you with getting a better understanding of the platform. While developing the dashboard, I had these open at all times:
- App Engine getting started guide;
- App Engine documentation for Python;
- Python tutorial for beginners;
