Google App Engine Setup

You can develop a web application for Google App Engine in Java, Python, and Go. I did it in Java, and here is a report of what I have done, from nothing till having a very simple web app running on appspot.com.

If you don't have any strong argument against Eclipse, it should a good idea to pick that IDE to develop for App Engine, and the reason is that Google makes available a plugin that would simplify a bit your job.

Currently are available plugins for Eclipse Europa, Ganymede, Galileo, Helios, and Indigo. You can install it directly from Eclipse, by the Software Update feature. If this does not work, firewall issues are a common reason for that, you can download the zipped plugin, and install it in Eclipse as a "New software".

Once the plugin is installed, we can run a testing version of the Google App Server locally. From the shell we go in a bit obscure directory, under eclipse\plugins, should be named something like:

com.google.appengine.eclipse.sdkbundle_1.6.1.v201112160242r37\appengine-java-sdk-1.6.1\

From there we can run the Application Server, in developing mode, passing to it as parameter the directory where it could find a .WAR file created for the Google App Engine.

For instance, to run the demo application Guestbook, we call:

> bin\dev_appserver.cmd demos\guestbook\war

You could have some error (again, a firewall issue could be the culprit), but if in the end you get the confirmation on the server going up and running on http://localhost:8080/, and:

The admin console is running at http://localhost:8080/_ah/admin

You are ready to open your favorite browser on localhost and see the test web application running locally.

Pay attention to the port number. If you run the server "by hand", as we have just seen, it is 8080, but when you run it from Eclipse the 8888 port number is used.