Google App Engine: on Eclipse it's a dream.

My first proper morning of having a look at the Java support for Google App Engine. A tip for anyone who is developing, make sure you have Eclipse and the AppEngine plugins, it works wonders.

Coding the app up is no real problem. If you are used to JDO queries then you'll be fine, I'm so used to JDBC hell that I had to read the docs. Where the plugins really shine is on deployment. It totally removes the whole command line procedure. Click once, enter your username and password and up it goes (fortunately not in smoke). All done and working.

Not a design classic but here's the first app.

Java in the cloud: First look at Google App Engine for Java

I was lucky to be one of the first 10,000 developers to get a closer look at the new Google App Engine for Java. Up until now it's been Python developers who had all the fun.

What's it got:
The Java environment provides a Java 6 JVM, a Java Servlets interface, and support for standard interfaces to the App Engine scalable datastore and services, such as JDO, JPA, JavaMail, and JCache.

First things first, if you use Eclipse there are some plugins that Google have developed for the development and deployment of Java apps for AppEngine. There's also a good guide on getting started here.

The problem with these sorts of things is thinking of something to code up. So I'm going to a think and come up with something.

More later.....