App Engine can finally receive mail. [bonus: delete your app as well]

App Engine can finally receive mail. [bonus: delete your app as well](googleappengine.blogspot.com)

65 points by skant 16 years ago | 26 comments

enomar 16 years ago |

Being able to delete an app is huge too. I've been waiting for this from day 1.

cmelbye 16 years ago |

Finally. Now, we just need wildcard subdomains...

chasingsparks 16 years ago | |

And naked domains... And SSL on Google App based domains...

bslatkin 16 years ago | |

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-features-in-...

""The second new feature is that we've enabled 'wildcard' domains for App Engine apps serving off appspot.com. What this means is that you can now create multiple subdomains for your App Engine app, and have them all served by the same application. Thus, your users can access 'myapp.appspot.com', or 'developer.myapp.appspot.com', or 'news.myapp.appspot.com', with your app deciding how to handle each request. No setup is required to use the wildcard domains - simply configure your app to serve up requests to these subdomains however you wish. You can detect which domain a user requested by looking at the 'Host' header in the incoming request - for example, in Python's webapp framework you can access this with self.request.headers['Host'].""

mark_l_watson 16 years ago |

AppEngine is pretty much awesome when you want to reduce web portal hosting costs. I am rewriting/augmenting a Rails web app in JRuby + Sinatra + DataMapper so it will run well on either Java AppEngine or one of my own servers using (C)Ruby. If my project gets a lot of users I would like to keep my costs down. (I usually deploy to Amazon AWS, but if you can live within the AppEngine restrictions, then AppEngine is even cheaper than Amazon.)

The ability of receiving email sounds good, but I usually only use this for new account verification - with AppEngine you can just use Google accounts.

quizbiz 16 years ago |

If I want to get started with App Engine but I have no experience, not with online apps nor with Python but I really want to learn, where would you guys suggest I start?

DocSavage 16 years ago | |

There are a number of books now appearing on App Engine:

http://billkatz.com/2009/1/Upcoming-App-Engine-Books

Sanderson's "Programming Google App Engine" book is now available through OReilly's Rough Cuts.

The MEAP version of "Google App Engine in Action" is in flux because the previous authors had another commitment. It turned into a positive, though, because Nick Johnson became an author. He's on the AE Team and has contributed a lot to the knowledge base. Check out his blog at http://blog.notdot.net/

Other web links you may find educational:

http://blog.appenginefan.com

http://appengine-cookbook.appspot.com/

http://gae4dummies.appspot.com/

And if you are in the SF Bay Area, go to the local meetups:

http://meetup.com/appengine

Even if you're not local, check out the group because we just started posting videos of the meetup. (See message board for links.)

grandalf 16 years ago | |

I'd recommend sticking with the basic webapp handlers in python and not trying to learn django, etc.

Just write a simple app that you think would be fun... maybe a blog app, or a simple forum, etc.

Python is pretty easy and the python libs have very easy to understand source (and decent documentation) in case you get confused.

If you really have zero experience with web apps, you might first want to play around with Sinatra a bit on your laptop, but the webapp framework on app engine is actually fairly similar to sinatra, so either one would be fine.

gcheong 16 years ago | |

I would start with the tutorial http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/gettingstarted/. They also have a Java API if that is more to your liking. See if you can follow and understand the tutorial and fill in any gaps where you seem to be lacking in knowledge or understanding with other sources. If you know any programming language I think the Python is relatively easy to follow.

quizbiz 16 years ago | | |

If I don't know any Java or Python, which would you recommend? Which is more similar to RoR?

davepeck 16 years ago |

(Warning: deleted app names can never be reclaimed.)

enomar 16 years ago | |

It's unfortunate that once deleted, names can't be reused by someone else. I imagine this has something to do with their security model.

timdorr 16 years ago | | |

Simple: You don't want a malicious developer snapping up old app names and replacing them with phishing sites.

amichail 16 years ago | | |

Why is the name important? Won't you be connecting it to your own domain name anyway?

henriklied 16 years ago |

Receiving email, that's great. One question: Is this a simple thing to setup for yourself (outside of GAE)?

I'd been wanting to do something like this for a while, converting an email to e.g. JSON. But I haven't found too much info on the subject..

arijo 16 years ago |

Does anyone know of a good alternative to app-engine-patch (http://code.google.com/p/app-engine-patch/) if you want to use Django to develop on GAE?

niels 16 years ago | |

Yes, you can use Django trunk if you do like this:

http://lethain.com/entry/2009/mar/05/deploying-django-spring...

arijo 16 years ago | | |

Thanks for the tip, but I was looking for a solution that would allow me to reuse contrib.auth and contrib.admin apps.

Please vote here for an AppEngine native Django support: http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thre...

pxlpshr 16 years ago |

I wonder if GAE will ever offer SMS support, like an open gateway. That would be pretty awesome for what we're working on.

n8agrin 16 years ago |

Wow, this was my #1 req, very happy.