Google Announces Release of App Engine 1.8.2

On the Google Cloud blog the company has announced the release of App Engine 1.8.2 which includes improvements for large-scale application development, developer tooling, runtimes and a new dedicated memcache service.

App Engine's new shared and dedicated memcache service requires no code changes when moving to dedicated memcache from shared and billing enabled apps can select dedicated memcache on the App Engine admin console's application settings page. Dedicated memcache is priced at 12 cents per GB per hour.

Google has simplified the ability for developers to deploy Python and PHP applications to App Engine with the new Source Push-to-Deploy. Developers using standard development tools such as Git will no longer have to context switch to deploy to App Engine.

The new App Engine Modules allow developers to divide out large-scale applications into logical components that can share stateful services and communicate securely. Developers can now start splitting their apps with a single configuration change for components that need their own performance configurations, authorizations, and versionings. Developers can create modules for any support languages.

Based on feedback from developers building PHP apps, Google has added support for mcrypt, iconv and mbstring extensions, as well as the ability to include and/or require PHP scripts directly from Google Cloud Storage.

Improvements to Cloud Storage integration include a drop-in plugin for WordPress that adds support for using Cloud Storage for storing uploaded content and to the Mail API for sending notifications.

Also updated is the Python 2.7 interpreter to Python 2.7.5, which has been recently released by the Python community and includes a number of bugfixes from Python 2.7.3 and Python 2.7.4.

Additionally, the updated Google Plugin For Eclipse now supports the Eclipse standard Web Tools Platform and Java EAR files.

A variety of bug fixes have also been achieved in the new version.