Setting up Google App Engine

Cloud computing was briefly mentioned in the introduction to this chapter. Google App Engine (GAE) is one of the offerings in that area. GAE puts each application made by users in separate sandboxes located somewhere in the Google data centers (Google Cloud). GAE automatically scales application resources according to the number of requests. GAE supports several Python web frameworks and numerical software such as NumPy.

To use GAE, we need a Google account, which is free. Download the GAE tools and libraries for various operating systems from https://developers.google.com/appengine/downloads. From this web page, we can download documentation and the GAE Eclipse plugin as well. For developers who use the Eclipse IDE, the plugin is recommended. The GAE Standard Development Kit (SDK) provides a development environment, which mimics the Google Cloud. GAE at the moment supports Python 2.7 only. We can manage GAE apps either with Python scripts or using a GUI, which...