Code in the Cloud: Programming Google AppEngine

Cloud applications are the next big shift in application development: instead of building single-user applications to run on a personal computer, new applications are being built as multi-user services that run in data centers around the world.

Code in the Cloud: Programming Google AppEngine will teach you what you need to make the shift to cloud development using Google’s AppEngine—a powerful, easy-to-use framework for developing cloud-based services.

The cloud is a platform for creating services, a new kind of application that can reach more users and provide those users with more capabilities than a desktop application ever could.

Building applications as cloud services makes them scalable: cloud applications can easily and smoothly adapt from running on a single computer for a single user to running on thousands of computers for millions of users.

This book will teach you what a cloud service is, and how it differs from traditional applications. It shows you how to build a cloud service by taking advantage of the services that AppEngine makes available to you, and by using iterative development of a simple application to guide you through the different aspects of AppEngine development, using either Python or Java.

Through the process of working on a simple application, you’ll learn about how to build an application as a service; how to manage persistent data using AppEngine; how to build dynamic, interactive user interfaces that run in a user’s web-browser; how to manage security in a web application; and how to interact with other services running in the AppEngine cloud.