Last Friday we announced support for Appcelerator RIA + Google AppEngine. This means you can build rich Internet applications using Appcelerator and then deploy them into the google cloud using Google’s AppEngine - which was released last Monday.
Appcelerator already has native support for building rich apps using a Python backend – we were quickly able to add support for appengine by leveraging this backend codebase. We made a number of changes to the product to make it seamless to interact with appengine, like leveraging the appcelerator CLI to support deployment.
To use it, you’ll need to first download the following pre-requisites: Python 2.5, the App Engine SDK, and the Appcelerator SDK.
Here’s a short screencast with instructions:
Once you have everything installed and ready, it’s easy to create a new appengine project:
app create:project ~/tmp my_app_name appengineMake sure that my_app_name matches the application identifier in your appengine dashboard.
This should create a project with everything you need to develop appcelerator apps using appengine. Open up your index.html, make some changes and then test the deployment into the cloud:
app deploy:project
This will deploy into the cloud and you should be able to navigate to your appengine URL to test it out.
You can also run locally:
app run:project
This will run your project locally for development and testing. Navigate to http://localhost:8080 to test it out after starting it up.
You should also check out a really cool demo that Tejus built. It’s called AppTunes. 
It’s a RIA application that sort of mimics Apple’s iTunes running in full-screen. It has a cool coverflow of album art and you can listen to streaming audio for each track in your browser. This app was built using the new appcelerator + appengine integration and is running in the cloud.
What’s cool about this application is that is shows how you can use Flash-based Flex components inside an Appcelerator based application. I believe this gives the best of both worlds: a standards-based, HTML/Ajax application that can leverage the power of the Flash capabilities.
And now, a message from our sponsors:
In the spirit of open source and shared learning, we’d like to acknowledge a few key pieces that we put together to make this demo application that Tejus built happen:
- Doug McCune for his super bad ass CoverFlow Flex Component. We’ve used the Appcelerator Widget API to widgetize this flex widget and allow it to be both declaratively added to markup and the power of Appcelerator’s Web Expression Language to add remoting capabilities for data binding. This also shows off the power of using Appcelerator + Adobe’s Flex bridge to get the best of both worlds.
- JS Sound Kit for the streaming audio for playing the MP3s. Again, we built this as a reusable widget.
- Jamendo and the independent artists for the awesome, DRM-free music and cool looking coverart.
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