I found myself talking about App Engine on the On Air tour, so I decided to change the example to not store the data locally with Gears, but instead to save it away into the cloud via App Engine.

Why did people want to hear about App Engine at an Adobe conference? I think that Jonathan Schwartz got it when he mentioned rich internet back-ends. As you build rich clients, you suddenly realise that the promised benefits of web services can kick into gear nicely.

Back to the sample. The architecture change was quite simple. Where I was doing a local DB save, I would call a back-end service such as /loadcontacts or /savecontact depending on the task.

You can view and download the full App Engine project code for this sample, and you can see it running live on App Engine

Check out the video below, or view the high quality version (recommended) to see the code walk through, and the various tools that App Engine gives you to develop, debug, and monitor your application running at a few thousand feet.

Since I am still in London, my sarcasm quotient extends just a little more than usual (it’s pretty high in the US to start with, even if it is the “lowest form of humour”).

I had a fair amount of email from people, and saw some blogs, complaining about the fact that Google App Engine currently supports Python only. On the video, and in the docs, it is frequently mentioned that other languages are to come, and that the infrastructure itself is language neutral. We have to start somewhere!

I personally have a slight Ruby preference, but there is a funny thing about Python. Hardly anyone really hates it. It may not be the language of choice for many people, but a lot of people are telling me:

• Ah, was hoping to try more Python
• I was looking for an excuse to code a Django app
• I can deal with that. Thank god you didn’t force Java

This is a little like the iPhone SDK being Objective-C. People are picking it up. I think this happens then your desire to play with the new toy is greater than your religion!

I am very excited to see more languages and features on Google App Engine, but I know that I just have to be a bit patient, and in the meantime, I had been looking for an excuse to code a Django app.