""The second new feature is that we've enabled 'wildcard' domains for App Engine apps serving off appspot.com. What this means is that you can now create multiple subdomains for your App Engine app, and have them all served by the same application. Thus, your users can access 'myapp.appspot.com', or 'developer.myapp.appspot.com', or 'news.myapp.appspot.com', with your app deciding how to handle each request. No setup is required to use the wildcard domains - simply configure your app to serve up requests to these subdomains however you wish. You can detect which domain a user requested by looking at the 'Host' header in the incoming request - for example, in Python's webapp framework you can access this with self.request.headers['Host'].""
The ability of receiving email sounds good, but I usually only use this for new account verification - with AppEngine you can just use Google accounts.
http://billkatz.com/2009/1/Upcoming-App-Engine-Books
Sanderson's "Programming Google App Engine" book is now available through OReilly's Rough Cuts.
The MEAP version of "Google App Engine in Action" is in flux because the previous authors had another commitment. It turned into a positive, though, because Nick Johnson became an author. He's on the AE Team and has contributed a lot to the knowledge base. Check out his blog at http://blog.notdot.net/
Other web links you may find educational:
http://appengine-cookbook.appspot.com/
http://gae4dummies.appspot.com/
And if you are in the SF Bay Area, go to the local meetups:
Even if you're not local, check out the group because we just started posting videos of the meetup. (See message board for links.)
Just write a simple app that you think would be fun... maybe a blog app, or a simple forum, etc.
Python is pretty easy and the python libs have very easy to understand source (and decent documentation) in case you get confused.
If you really have zero experience with web apps, you might first want to play around with Sinatra a bit on your laptop, but the webapp framework on app engine is actually fairly similar to sinatra, so either one would be fine.
I'd been wanting to do something like this for a while, converting an email to e.g. JSON. But I haven't found too much info on the subject..
http://lethain.com/entry/2009/mar/05/deploying-django-spring...
Please vote here for an AppEngine native Django support: http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers/browse_thre...
