Posted by Dick Wall, Google App Engine Team

In May, Google will be holding two free Google App Engine developer events: one in New York and one in San Francisco.

Learn about Google App Engine

The events will include training on the major features of Google App Engine, including data modeling, the App Engine APIs, some aspects of Django, and how to mashup App Engine with other web services. Google Engineers and Product Managers will be on hand to help and answer questions throughout the day.

As well as covering the Google App Engine SDK, we will show you how to deploy and manage your own applications on Google App Engine servers. For people who don’t already have a Google App Engine account, we will be inviting people who come to the hack-a-thon to develop on App Engine.

Build With Us, or Build Your Own

We will use the information shared at the event to build up a working Google App Engine application throughout the day, which you can code along with us. On the other hand, if you already have a great idea for what to build, bring that idea along. Even better, bring along anything you can prepare ahead of time (sketches, designs, web page mock ups, etc.) and use the time and information provided to develop your idea into a working application, then share it with the world.

What Do I Need?

We will provide facilities, power, food and refreshments and experts to help you learn to use Google App Engine and write your application. Just bring your laptops, ideas and enthusiasm to complete the mix. We will assume some basic skills and preparation for the event, and these details will be provided soon.

When and Where?

The first event will be in New York, on May 7th from 10am to 6pm. The second will be in San Francisco on May 16th from 10am to 10pm. Space is limited so sign up now!

New York Hack-a-thon

San Francisco Hack-a-thon

Google App Engine is a development and hosting platform that allows developers to host web-based applications on Google’s infrastructure. Google App Engine is currently available as a limited preview release.

Editions impacted:
Standard, Premier, Education, and Partner Editions

Languages impacted:
US English

How to access what’s new:
Sign up for the preview release at http://appengine.google.com/a/your-domain.com. Be sure to replace ‘your-domain.com’ with your actual domain name.

For more information:
http://google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?answer=91077

Posted by Kevin Gibbs, Software Engineer

One upcoming feature of Google App Engine that’s worth mentioning is large-scale data import and export. We know that many of you have large apps that already run on other platforms, and getting all of that data into the Datastore API is a challenge. And, conversely, we also know that a lot of you want to make sure it’s easy to move off Google App Engine in the future, in case you need to switch to a different platform.

With Google App Engine, you own all the data in your app. As stated in our terms, you always have the right to get your data out of Google App Engine at any point. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

To that end, we would like to solicit feedback on what form you would like the data exporter feature to take. We’ve started a thread in the discussion group about this, and we’d love to hear what you think. XML output? CSV transform? AtomPub? RDF? Let us know!