Is there a mechanism to receive emails and/or establish IMAP connections in Google App Engine? I know that GAE provides limited support for the JavaMail API (i.e. only allow to send emails). Any workaround?
For future readers of this post: the ability to receive email has been recently added to Google App Engine. Link to announcement
Not currently, but it is on the roadmap:
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html
See http://www.smtp2web.com/ (made by a googler) for a temporary solution.
No, that is a limitation of the system (network calls are essentially limited to web requests).
Related
My Django app is working on GAE with Cloud SQL（MySQL）.
By using New Relic Monitoring, I tracked requests done by my app to www.googleapis.com.
I don't know those requests. Can somebody explain this behavior?
(app connecting with cloud proxy)
As merely described here, there are various processes running in the instance along side (with?) your application... scaling, billing, logging, etc. Communication with other Google Cloud Services (like the ones I previously mentioned) is mainly done through Google Cloud APIs. Since App Engine is a managed Platform as a Service, this management needs to be done somehow... a myriad of REST API requests and responses do this. Partly through the www.googleapis.com endpoint.
You don't have to worry, though... your application's performance is not affected by this, nor your billing account.
I am going to build an API for my mobile app using GAE. I am looking for a way to separate the whole application into separate services, trying out the microservice architecture.
The problem is there seems to be no information about any VPN or private network between GAE apps. Therefore, based on my understanding, when one of the GAE apps sends HTTP requests to other GAE apps in same account, its traffic will be treated as Internet traffic and therefore I will be charged for outbound bandwidth.
Am I correct?
Yes.
App Engine applications/Cloud Platform projects are isolated from each other by default, even if they were created using the same Google account.
Consider looking into Modules (link for Java) to implement individual services of your application.
I have a Cloud App hosted on Windows Azure and I need to integrate XMPP with the service. Can I use GAE's XMPP API to achieve this? I'll need to be able to create new Jabber IDs and send & receive messages from other clients like GTalk.
As far as I know, GAE only supports Java, Python and my expertise is limited to .NET & C#; so, I'll have to make my Azure App to communicate with the GAE.
Finally, can I use GAE as an alternative to running ejabbered on Windows Azure Virtual Machines or Amazon EC2?
Thanks in advance... :)
You could but it would be very limited. You may be better off running ejabbered somewhere else.
With GAE's XMPP API, your username selection is rather limited. See the GAE XMPP Overview API documentation.
Your Cloud App would need to send and receive messages from your GAE app via HTTP accesses. This is no big deal for sending, but you'll have to work your own way of receiving messages. You could buffer your messages to the datstore and poll for messages. You could use the Channel API to receive messages directly, but so far the Channel API client is only available in Javascript, so your app would need some sort of javascript interpreter to use the client.
You will be able to send/receive messages from other XMPP addresses like GTalk clients.
I have an AppEngine application which uses Google Accounts as authentication. What is the approach or idea on seeing if someone is online or using the application? And able to chat to online users.
Thanks.
The official way to implement chat on App Engine is using the Channel API. However, the quotas are strange, and it's fairly expensive at $0.01/100 connections.
I would recommend using a hosted web socket service like Pusher, or running your own nodejs server on another host.
You can use the XMPP API to get users status, and send them messages that appear in Google Chat.
https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/xmpp/
I would like to create a web IM chat system using Google App Engine using XMPP possibly.
It would allow users of a social network to talk with each other.
Is this possible using GAE?
I haven't used GAE before. Does anybody know of any good examples/code which I could look into to get started?
If all your communication is between users who are interacting with your site directly, there's no need to use XMPP, or benefit from it - just write your IM system into the site directly. XMPP support is designed for interaction with external IM services.
Alternately, you could embed the Google Talk gadget in your site, but that will require users to sign in to their Google accounts to use it.
It's certainly possible. I would start with reading http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/using_xmpp.html in order to get started.