Many businesses and developers rely on Google’s App Engine to deliver their content to the Web. It’s a good thing then that Google is not being lazy with constant updates being made to the platform. Yesterday marked the release of version 1.6.5 of the Google App Engine.

The first update is being made to the Datastore. Google is introducing an experimental type of query called a projection query. The company says that this new type of query has the “same cost and performance characteristics as keys-only queries but return entity objects populated only with the requested properties.”

On top of that, there are some other new features coming to Datastore as well. Here’s the full feature list:

Each entity group now has a numeric version property that strictly increases on every entity group change. You can use this counter, for example, to easily and consistently cache the results of an ancestor query, such as the count of all entities in an entity group

The Datastore Admin now allows you to restore individual Kinds from an existing backup, abort in-progress backups, and view more detailed backup and restore information.

For Python users, the @db.transactional decorator now supports concurrent transactions. We’ve also expanded the options available for the db.run_in_transtion_options() function.

There are some new features coming to the Images API as well. The first is that the Images API can now access image objects stored in Google Cloud Storage. The second has URLs generated by get_serving_url or getServingUrl can now be generated to serve over HTTPS.

Google is also including additional Request Headers in the newest release. They’ve added Region, City and LatLng headers to each request “where this information can be inferred from the IP address.”

A small note to Java developers, you now must include the threadsafe element in your appengine-web.xml file. If you don’t, it will cause an error in the dev appserver.

Finally, Google is looking for Trusted Testers for Task Queue Statistics. The feature allows you to “fetch statistics and information about your task queue from within your application.” If that sounds like something you would want to test, you can apply to be a Trusted Tester here.