Thursday, April 8, 2010

Google App Engine 0.0.11 gems released

We recently released the 0.0.11 google-appengine gem. We published the latest App Engine SDK, and now use bundler to fetch the jruby-rack gem. The latest App Engine APIs include bug fixes for memcache and HTTPS, and we pushed a new DM adapter with some experimental new features:
  • App Engine Rack updated to version 0.0.7 and now includes
    deferred dispatcher and depends on JRuby-Rack 0.9.7 gem
  • App Engine SDK updated to version 1.3.2
  • App Engine APIs updated to version 0.0.14
  • DM Adapter updated to version 0.0.8
Reliable Spin-up - Our biggest show-stopper has been apps not consistently initializing within 30 seconds. Thankfully, @urekat came up with a simple solution to mitigate this problem, using redirects to break-up loading requests. We've packaged the deferred dispatcher with appengine-rack for your convenience.
JRuby Updates - A new version of Warbler was just release, we hope to take advantage of some of the new features for our Rails 3 setup process. We also expect to see a release candidate of JRuby 1.5 any day now, and jruby-openssl 0.6.1 should follow.
OAuth & OpenID - Thanks to some hard work from @ribrdb and @nahi, the jruby-openssl 0.6.1 gem will work properly on App Engine. The lack of a released gem has not stopped some developers from forging ahead. You should wait for jruby-openssl 0.6.1, but here are a couple examples from @azazeal and @baroquebobcat that use an altered gem to support OAuth and OpenID.
Nokogiri Java Port - As @headius has recently reported, the pure-Java version is very close to 100% passing. Thanks to an epic effort from Sergio Arbeo, Patrick Mahoney, Yoko Harada and others. It looks like they'll push it over the edge very soon.
App Engine Birthday - App Engine had a second birthday last week, and App Engine for Java is now only one year old. JRuby developers should be very excited with the recently published product roadmap. There was also an interesting TechCrunch article today.
Success Stories - A recent tweet from @app engine links to a blog post about Starting your business in less than a week with Rails on App Engine. The app runs Rails 2.3.5 with DataMapper on App Engine. The timing was just right when @azazeal started building his app, and he was determined to push through any issues. We also have a lot of utility apps like jruby-ci, so if you've been on the fence, consider using App Engine for your next Ruby app.