The 2nd Edition Has Begun

I'm excited to announce that the 2nd edition of Programming Google App Engine is now available in Rough Cuts!

When PGAE was first published almost two years ago, App Engine sought to prove that the scalable architecture necessary for broad success on the Internet, the same architecture used by Google for its own web applications, could be presented in a programming and deployment paradigm as easy to use as a web server and a database. Billions of page views and hundreds of thousands of apps later, App Engine is now the basis for businesses and organizations building high-traffic applications, including shopping and entertainment websites, networked mobile apps, embedded social apps, government outreach sites, and enterprise services and utilities. Mobile and social use cases in particular have proven to be a strong fit for App Engine, as they require a higher degree of real-time traffic and data management than smaller, more static websites.

App Engine as a platform has grown substantially. New scalable services added large data object serving, real-time browser communications, and versatile computation architecture with backends and pull queues. A new version of the datastore brought high availability and reliability to apps, with full read-write access even during major system outages. App Engine launched a new runtime environment with native support for the Go programming language. The SDKs have grown too, with new frameworks, libraries, and tools for managing and testing apps. App Engine recently received SAS70 and SSAE-16 certification. And Google has announced that later this year, App Engine will leave its "preview" status, and will launch official premier support options.

I think it's time to update the book.

My first task is to catch up all of the existing material from the 1st edition to the latest releases. The text currently available to Rough Cuts subscribers includes changes to the first few chapters, and I'll be working my way through the remaining chapters over the next few weeks. Then I'll begin work on all-new chapters for the all-new features. Throughout the past two years I've been assembling huge piles of notes on topics such as functionality and performance testing, web application design best practices, and common real-world scenarios. And for the last 8 months I've been working full-time on a project at Google based on App Engine that I can't wait to tell you about. O'Reilly has threatened to shut off my SVN access at the first snowfall—luckily I'm in Seattle so I figure I have until early January—so I'll have to work quickly, and only a fraction of what I want to write will make it into the book.

You can help! Rough Cuts went really well for the 1st edition. It was great hearing from the community about what you wanted to see in the book, which parts were working, which parts weren't. That feedback made it into the book in real time. Let's do it again. Preorder the 2nd edition and get online access immediately, and full access to the final draft when it's done. (Unfortunately I don't see a "pre-order the PDF/ePub e-book + Rough Cuts" option yet; I've asked about that, we'll see what happens.) Email me whenever you like. I can't promise a response, but I'll read whatever you send.

And if you're into that sort of thing, follow me on Google+ (and if you need an invite, let me know). If you see me getting high scores on Angry Birds, be sure to yell at me to get back to writing.