Inspirational Technology

Google recently announced a new cloud based application deployment system called Google App Engine. I’ve been playing around with App Engine for the last few days and it’s really interesting. If you build an app for it you’re REALLY locked into Google, but the benefits of the system are pretty compelling. Since the SDK they released is Open Source we decided to put together a JumpBox for it.

The JumpBox gives you a drop in place system for doing Google App Engine development that’s contained in an isolated environment within a virtual machine. It runs exactly the same on Mac, Windows or Linux and gives you a development environment that lets you take advantage of great virtualization features like snapshots. It will run from a single download on Parallels Desktop, any VMWare product, Virtual Iron, Microsoft Virtual PC/Server and Xen Open Source in fully virtualized mode.

It’s a great solution if you want to play with the Google App Engine SDK without really installing it on your system. It’s also perfect as an integration point for a small team working together on a Google App Engine project.

Google made it possible to build applications for App Engine using several different mechanisms and the JumpBox comes with CGI, Google Webapp and Django environments setup and ready for development. It’s also a really great way to just kick the tires of the different frameworks before committing to development.

Also, since this is a JumpBox our backup system is included which allows you to backup your source code and development data to network shares or Amazon S3.

The JumpBox for Google App Engine Development is just something we put together because it looked interesting, if people find it useful we’ll continue developing it and tracking Google’s SDK releases. I think there are a lot of things we could add to it to make it a really useful tool for developing apps. If you have any suggestions definitely let me know.

Get more information and download the JumpBox