Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
Addressbook History goes into the cloud with App Engine
Category: Server
Re-posted from my personal blog
I recently built an example of the Form History Pattern using an Addressbook case study.
I found myself talking about App Engine on the On Air tour, so I decided to change the example to not store the data locally with Gears, but instead to save it away into the cloud via App Engine.
Why did people want to hear about App Engine at an Adobe conference? I think that Jonathan Schwartz got it when he mentioned rich internet back-ends. As you build rich clients, you suddenly realise that the promised benefits of web services can kick into gear nicely.
Back to the sample. The architecture change was quite simple. Where I was doing a local DB save, I would call a back-end service such as /loadcontacts or /savecontact depending on the task.
You can view and download the full App Engine project code for this sample, and you can see it running live on App Engine
Check out the video below, or view the high quality version (recommended) to see the code walk through, and the various tools that App Engine gives you to develop, debug, and monitor your application running at a few thousand feet.
My buddy and I were at the New Yor hack-A-Thon and subsequently have put together a poll app in appengine. I have to say it’s pretty straight forward and aside from the recent outage we’ve had no problems.
http://www.modpoll.com/