Google App Engine 1.8.2 Offers Improved App Development

For cloud developers working on large-scale applications, the new Google (GOOG) App Engine version may provide some relief. According to a blog post from Chris Ramsdale, App Engine 1.8.2 (which launched this week) includes significant improvements to large-scale application development, as well as developer tooling, runtimes and a new dedicated memcache service.

Ramsdale, who is a product manager for Google App Engine, outlined the new and updated features on his blog. They include:

• The launch of dedicated memcache in Preview. Ramsdale noted that a free shared memcache is already being used by App Engine developers to cache data for performance improvement, but sometimes it's not enough. The launch of a dedicated memcache gives them the ability to purchase in-memory data caching capacity for their applications so they can cache more data and drive up cache hit rates. According to Ramsdale, it can also reduce Datastore costs and make applications faster.
• Git support has been added for developers who work with standard development tools and don't want to have to context switch to deploy to App Engine. Now it's easier to deploy such apps on App Engine.
• A new feature is App Engine Modules, which enables developers to split out large-scale applications into logical components. Google is trying to make it easier to build out large-scale apps using App Engine.
• Google has made improvements to its Cloud Storage integration and launched a drop-in plugin for WordPress under its support for PHP Runtime. Google App Engine first started supporting PHP in the 1.8.1 release.
• The Python 2.7 interpreter has been updated to the recently released Python 2.7.5.
• Finally, Google has updated the Google Plugin for Eclipse to fully support the Eclipse standard Web Tools Platform and Java EAR files.

The entire list of updates and new features can be found in Google App Engine's release notes.