14 DAY TRIAL // The Google App Engine now comes with support for the Java language, Google announced at Campfire One. On April 7, 2009 the Mountain View-based search giant revealed the second language supported by the App Engine, emphasizing that it was permitting only an early look at the project. In this regard, Google has in fact limited access to only the first 10,000 developers that will sign up, on a first-come-first-served basis. The search giant indicated that the limitation was only temporary, and that the testing pool would be expanded as soon as it would be possible.
“App Engine now supports the standards that make Java tooling great. (We're working on the tooling too, with Google Plugin for Eclipse). It provides the current App Engine API's and wraps them with standards where relevant, like the Java Servlet API, JDO and JPA, javax.cache, and javax.mail. It also provides a secure sandbox that's powerful enough to run your code safely on Google's servers, while being flexible enough for you to break abstractions at will,” revealed Don Schwarz and Toby Reyelts, software engineers, Google App Engine Team.
In the video embedded at the bottom of this article you will be able to see a demonstration of just what Google App Engine support for Java enables developers to do. In fact, following the initial release, support for Java was the most requested feature for the evolution of the App Engine, and Google emphasized that with the latest move it was responding to feedback from developers. Schwarz and Reyelts warned that devs were bound to run into compatibility speed bumps with the latest changes introduced to the App Engine, but that Google would labor to resolve any issues.
“The team has also been working on many other improvements to App Engine, which we're really excited to launch to you as well: access to firewalled data: grant policy-controlled access to your data behind the firewall; Cron support: schedule tasks like report generation or DB clean-up at an interval of your choosing; database import: move GBs of data easily into your App Engine app. Matching export capabilities are coming soon, hopefully within a month,” Schwarz and Reyelts added.