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Mastering Google App Engine

Mastering Google App Engine

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Mastering Google App Engine

Mastering Google App Engine

3 (2)

Overview of this book

Developing web applications that serve millions of users is no easy task, as it involves a number of configurations and administrative tasks for the underlying software and hardware stack. This whole configuration requires not only expertise, but also a fair amount of time as well. Time that could have been spent on actual application functionality. Google App Engine allows you develop highly scalable web applications or backends for mobile applications without worrying about the system administration plumbing or hardware provisioning issues. Just focus writing on your business logic, the meat of the application, and let Google's powerful infrastructure scale it to thousands of requests per second and millions of users without any effort on your part. This book takes you from explaining how scalable applications work to designing and developing robust scalable web applications of your own, utilizing services available on Google App Engine. Starting with a walkthrough of scalability is and how scalable web applications work, this book introduces you to the environment under which your applications exist on Google App Engine. Next, you will learn about Google's datastore, which is a massively scalable distributed NoSQL solution built on top of BigTable. You will examine the BigTable concepts and operations in detail and reveal how it is used to build Google datastore. Armed with this knowledge, you will then advance towards how to best model your data and query that along with transactions. To augment the powerful distributed dataset, you will deep dive into search functionality offered on Google App Engine. With the search and storage sorted out, you will get a look into performing long running tasks in the background using Google App Engine task queues along with sending and receiving emails. You will also examine the memcache to boost web application performance, image processing for common image manipulation tasks. You will then explore uploading, storing, and serving large files using Blobstore and Cloud storage. Finally, you will be presented with the deployment and monitoring of your applications in production along with a detailed look at dividing applications into different working modules.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
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11
Index

Request handling


Instead of jumping straight into the alphabet soup of HTTP, CGI (Common Gateway Interface), WSGI (Web Server Gateway Interface), and so on, we will examine the entire problem of request handling from where all it started. The basic design goal of the Web was sharing information in the form of documents. So, all in all, it was a document-sharing system, where each document had a unique URL like a unique path for each file (ignoring links and shortcuts for the sake of discussion) on a file system. Each document could be linked to other documents. This was the simple HTTP Web.

The initial Web was simple and consisted of two pair of programs. One piece of program, which was called the client (nowadays, it is mostly in the form of a modern desktop or a mobile browser), would request a document by opening a socket for a given server and on a specific port using a very specific request format like this as textual data:

Host: www.mit.edu
GET /publications/quantum/computing/future...

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