Saturday, June 12, 2010

Google App Engine 0.0.14 gems released

We recently released the 0.0.14 google-appengine gem. This release will let developers set specific versions of jruby-jars or jruby-rack by simply updating the Gemfile. We also include the necessary API jars inside appengine-apis, so now bundler does all the work. Folks looking to experiment with Rails 3, can use the App Engine Java SDK along with warbler, or just create a custom build script.
  • App Engine Tools updated to version 0.0.14
  • App Engine Rack updated to version 0.0.10
  • App Engine APIs updated to version 0.0.17
  • JRuby 1.5.1 and JRuby-OpesSSL 0.7 support
DataMapper 1.0 - David Masover released the dm-appengine 0.1 gem, which works with DataMapper 1.0. David and @dbussink were able to sync up at RailsConf, we look forward to more collaboration in the future. David also posted the the source from the cart demo app in his talk.

Haml Support - Nathan Weizenbaum also released a new haml gem with specific changes to support App Engine. We load gems from jar files, and File.expand_path can produce strange results. I know that many developers were depending on haml, we really appreciate all the effort @nex3 put into making this work.

Recent Articles - John Wang wrote an excellent article on GData on Rails on Google App Engine that adapts Jeff Scudder's recent GData Tutorial. Ikai Lan, also wrote up an excellent post on Using the bulkloader with Java App Engine.

Scaling Rails - We met Jose Cortinas at BofConf, and he agreed to help us create the JavaScript front-end for a JSON-emitting Duby app. To kick off our hackfest, @jacortinas gave a demo of the app he created. The index and show methods are handled from a static page, using jQuery and mustache.js, with the Duby servlet on the back-end. All other methods are still handled with Rails and DataMapper. The benefit of this configuration is that new instances can respond in a second, because GET requests completely bypass the JRuby runtime and the Rails stack.

Search with Lucene - Starting from Ikai's recent post, Sarah Allen created a lucene demo on App Engine. She presented at the hackfest as well, and even write up this wonderful post about full text search on app engine. The following day, @ultrasaurus presented the app at RailsConf, and gave a nice shout-out to the JRuby Team.

RailsConf Session - Ryan Brown and I were joined by David Masover for our talk, Scaling Rails on App Engine wih JRuby and Duby. We've come a long way in one year. We have real Rails apps in production, and the DataMapper adapter has elegant transaction support. I've posted the slides from our talk, which include David's excellent DataMapper examples.