What's possible on Google App Engine

While all we looked at was a basic Hello World application on App Engine, it can host pretty complex applications supporting a pretty wide spectrum of use cases. What you can build on App Engine can start from basic tools and web widgets to collaborative applications, gaming applications and even highly scalable enterprise applications. While you need to be aware of the basic restrictions in programming on a Cloud Environment and working in a sandbox environment support for Python, Java, JVM based languages means there is a pretty wide variety of Apps that you can setup and run on App Engine.

The best way to understand what is possible on App Engine is to look at the App Engine Gallery and review the kinds of applications already built and hosted on the App Engine. Lets profile some of the types of applications hosted on the App Engine to understand what's possible. While the actual details about how these applications have been implemented is not publically available on the App Engine we have included some details on how it should be possible to build something similar.

Script Transliteration: ST Bot is a gtalk bot which transliterates a sentence in English to another language automatically. For example if you type in a sentence in gtalk it convert it into a hindi script. Building an app similar to this is possible by setting up a simple Gtalk Bot hosted on App Engine and using the Data Store for storing the transliteration mapping. Check back for a future post on how to write a Gtalk bot using python on App Engine.

Survey App While writing a survey web app is simple, i thought it is pretty interesting since with App Engine you can build a free survey app. While this app provides some basic surveys you can build a pretty extensive survey app with App Engine complete with email notifications and even some great survey reports using GWT visualization APIs.

Gaming: Now if you want to test out how extensible a platform is what better than a gaming application. Check out Neptune's Pride its a multi player online strategy game completely hosted on App Engine. Try it out. Stunned ? I think this game is a clear indication that pretty much anything is possible. This game is a python based application with a python game engine as well. I am sure this should a brew a number of interesting game ideas on App Engine.

Source Repository: Gitfarm is a Git repository on App Engine. Very interesting that something like this could be easily setup/built with some knowledge of Java and some open source components like JGit and an understanding of Google Datastore. Or on the other hand you could try and implement this on your own.

Content Management System: Vosao is an open source CMS system built on java and deployed on Google App Engine. Being open source it allows for easy extensions with plugins and can be customized completely based on needs. Understanding the source code is a great starting point to building your own CMS on App Engine. There are clear step by step instructions on how to setup an instance on your own google app engine account.

Blog: Micolog is an open source blogging framework based on Python and can be hosted on Google App Engine. Why another blog engine you might ask. Well Why Not ? We truly have only 2 major blogging platforms Wordpress and Blogger. Why not more competition and an open source, python based blog tool would be a great way to start.

Social Feed: This is really an excellent social feed tracker for news items on twitter, digg for how many times an article is referenced. A great tool to identify upcoming and hot topics. Very interesting app to be implemented on App Engine.

Reporting: Financial Analyzer is a simple one page application hosted on Google App Engine where you can query and analyze financial data for a listed company. I think what really works for the application is its speed and simple user interface for the report with a easy to read and navigate format. Would be a great app to emulate for other similar ideas, how about reporting performance of educational institutes across India based on common entrance test results.

Location Based Microblog: Twittori is a neat idea. Location based tweets by allow the tool to identify your current location and login using twitter to start looking for tweets to your location. Very interesting app to start communicating with friends or make new twitter circles within your locality. Also has an iPhone based app as well.

AppDemopod: AppDemopod is an App Engine application which allows you to setup online demos for products and tools. Completely web based with interactive web based demos the application is great for product demos and tutorials.

You can check out the complete listing on the App Engine Gallery which should be a great way to get started by checking out real examples. We will also follow up in some future posts on how we could go about building a few apps like the ones above.