Java support for Google App Engine

On the morning of april 7, 2009, Google announced Java support for App Engine. There is a catch, only a list of core Java classes are supported so there is bound to be a debate about it.

I was very excited to hear this news. Google restricted access to the first 10,000 developers who sign up. I wanted to test drive it so I signed up for an account on 7th evening. I was actually surprised to get my account approved the next day. I thought I was late in signing up but looks like I was not.

I downloaded the AppEngine Java SDK and the Google plugin for Eclipse on my Windows laptop. I am a heavy Eclipse user, so was very happy to see the plugin. I followed the directions for installation and setup. It was pretty straightforward unlike some problems I ran into with the Python App Engine installation and setup on Mac last time. I wanted to do it on my mac but it was indisposed at that time. I went ahead and created a project with a simple servlet as per the instructions, uploaded it to my account and everything worked like a charm.

Google also has a running list of frameworks, lanaguages and libraries which will run on the App Engine. Lot of JVM based languages like Jython, Groovy etc are supported. So now a wider community will embrace Google App Engine.