Tag Archives: gae

How to manage Google AppEngine maintenance periods

AppEngine logoHere is a small snippet of code that I use on applications deployed on Google AppEngine to inform users that the application is in maintenance mode.

It usually happen when the AppEngine team put the datastore in read-only mode for maintenance purpose but other capabilities can be tested as well.

This is a python decorator and you can use it to decorate views that require write access to the datastore. For example:

You will need to create a Django template named maintenance.html to display a warning to your users. Mine looks like this:

I Can Haz Java?

They announced it yesterday at the Google Campfire ’09 (here and here) and it is today on the Google App Engine blog: Java is now supported on Google App Engine!

It comes with a set of Eclipse plugins to test and deploy Java servlets, using JDO or JPA to support database access. Of course, the database behind this is BigTable, which means that a lot of relational features are not available, but it scales!

Go there to get you started, or, if you want to know if your preferred framework will play well with GAE, go to the “Will it play in App Engine” page.

That’s good news! Especially because we may start having more and more Java applications outside of the corporate walls.

Yes Google, YES!