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You have three options at the moment, when it comes to a 'multi-tenant' app such as you describe: You can have a single app that your customers add to their domains. Your app will have a single datastore, but you can use the Host header to determine which customer is accessing the app, and segregate the datastore entries based on that. Easy to deploy and upgrade Easy for customers to install Users have to have Google accounts, not Apps accounts, to log in. You can deploy a fresh app instance for each customer. Harder to deploy and upgrade More customer involvement required to install Provides firm separation of data Users can log in with their Apps credentials You can work with Google to create a new Apps Marketplace app All the benefits of point 1 and 2, above Requires Google involvement No certain release date yet

I figure it is going to take me at least four iterations to get this right. The first one will be building a GWT application with a simple UI that has no server logic behind it (just to learn how layout in GWT works). Step two will be adding a fake servlet backend (not app engine, just in memory). While not exactly App Engine yet, I should have a completely specified client-server API by the end of this process that I can subsequently implement on App Engine (iteration 3). Iteration four will handle deployment, CSS and whatever I may screw up in iterations one and two. I will log my notes of things I run into while I code.

The easiest way to get setup rapidly is to download the template project from the download section. It provides a ready-to-go project with the right configuration files pre-filled and an appropriate directory layout: web.xml preconfigured with the Gaelyk servlets appengine-web.xml with the right settings predefined (static file directive) a sample Groovlet and template the needed JARs (Groovy, Gaelyk and Google App Engine SDK)

Running your application locally Google App Engine provides a local servlet container, powered by Jetty, which lets you run your applications locally. If you're using the Gaelyk template, when you're at the root of your project — and we assume you have installed the App Engine SDK on your machine — you can run your application with the following command-line: dev_appserver.sh war

Deploying your application in the cloud Once you're at the root of your application, simply run the usual deployment command: appcfg.sh update war

The war/ directory uses the WAR standard layout for bundling web applications. (WAR archive files are not yet supported by the SDK.) The Eclipse plugin uses this directory for running the development server, and for deploying the app to App Engine. When Eclipse builds your project, it creates a directory named classes/ in war/WEB-INF/, and puts compiled class files here. Eclipse also copies non-source files found in src/ to war/WEB-INF/classes/, including META-INF/ and the log4j.properties and logging.properties files. The final contents of the war/ directory make up your application for testing and deployment. For details about the new project that the plugin creates, see the Getting Started Guide.