Programming Google App Engine, 2009-2015

Welcome! This is the official website of a series of books I wrote about Google App Engine from 2009 to 2015. As you can imagine, the books are quite out of date at this point, and I don't have any plans to continue this series. I'm happy to keep this website here as an archive of the project.

For seventeen years, this website ran on Google App Engine itself. Starting today, it no longer does so. This is not a mark against App Engine! I just moved it to more conventional web hosting to amortize my hosting costs. One of the benefits of App Engine is that you only pay for the computing and network resources that you use, with a small amount included for free. In the year of 2026, I was seeing traffic spikes from genAI training crawlers that were costing me real money, so I felt it was about time to relocate.

Google App Engine is still a supported product in the Google Cloud suite, and I still like it. The original runtime environments described by the books, Python 2.7 and Java 8, were deprecated in January of 2024, and as of this writing are expected to be officially decommissioned in early 2026. Of course, there are many newer runtimes available, including (as of this writing) Python 3.7 to 3.14, and Java 11, 17, and 21. The language-specific runtimes now also include Node.js, PHP, Go, and Ruby. Google App Engine also supports hosting arbitrary Docker containers, so you can use whatever language you like.

App Engine was an early precursor to many serverless web and microservice products that we take for granted today. If you're starting a new project, you might consider Google Cloud Run, a successor to App Engine intended for more flexibility.

As for me, come check out what else I'm working on these days at dansanderson.com.

Cheers!
— Dan