It’s been a few months since an update hit Google’s App Engine. The company has been working on the large scale version, Compute Engine, since its unveiling at Google I/O in June. That doesn’t mean they forgot about App Engine though. In fact, the fine folks at Google have spent the summer making it even better.
Google announced that App Engine 1.7.2 is available to all users. They explain that the delay in release came from the team spending the entire summer killing bugs that had been submitted. In all, they were able to squash more than 130 bugs since the last major update in May.
Bug fixes are nice, but new features are equally important to the advancement of a product. The latest version of App Engine doesn’t disappoint by allowing developers to upload more than 1GB of code and static files to the cloud. Storage under 1GB will remain free, but anything over will cost $0.13/GB per month.
The update adds more code support to App Engine as well. Google says that PyCrypto 2.6 is now fully supported as a third party library in Python 2.7. Java users will be delighted to learn that Java Threads are also now fully supported.
A final update gives users the ability to fetch Task Queue Statistics. Google says that this allows you to view statistics and information from your task queue from within an application. This should be especially useful to developers who have to keep a constant eye on the apps they’re running.
Outside of updates, Google is also looking to start a new tester program. They’re looking for people to start testing outbound socket functionality in App Engine. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, you can sign up here.
