Tutorial Series: Developing a Google App Engine Application

Important: As of July 2015, this tutorial no longer works, as App Engine has shut down the Master/Slave Data Store that the application uses. We are keeping it online for reference purposes and you can still download the code, but it needs to be converted to the newer High Availability Data Store to work.

We, web developers, are a lucky bunch. There is no other area in software craftsmanship, where technologies evolve in such a pace that a platform can impact the way we develop applications just a couple of years after its inception. It is also getting easier and cheaper to launch web services that can scale to the millions of users without the nightmare of backing your growth with monstrous infrastructure.

But this comes at a cost. Web development is also the area where your knowledge is quickly outdated, and learning new technologies has to be an inseparable part of your day.

This tutorial series, hosted here, at Tutorialzine, is going to guide you through the process of creating a useful real-life application for monitoring your website performance and uptime. This webapp is hosted on Google's App Engine platform, and is developed with Python and jQuery.

Target Audience

The tutorials comprising this series are targeted at developers with at least a general understanding of web applications. Python is a straightforward language and should not be a problem if you have experience in PHP, JavaScript or other web languages. Additionally, the articles explain the code in detail and provide links to useful resources for you to broaden your knowledge.

The Web Application

We are developing a web application that monitors the response times and availability of you web site. It presents your data in a dynamic jQuery chart, with a list of downtime records and their durations.

You can see a live demo at http://dashboard.tutorialzine.com/. The code is licensed under the Tzine license, which means you can can download and modify it as you see fit.

The Series

The series consists of several tutorials, which are going to be linked to in the list below. This post is going to serve as a guide to the series, and a starting point for those who wish to follow it. You can alternatively subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on twitter to get notified when these are released.

• Getting Started;
• Organizing Your Project;
• Using the Webapp Framework;
• The Controllers;
• Creating the Front End;