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

you could leverage Entity's getProperties() method, in combination with JSON-lib's groovy-friendliness and ability to serialize maps as JSON. So, say you have an Entity: def person = new Entity("person") person.name = "Guillaume Laforge" def jsonString = person.properties as JSONObject Have a look at JSON-lib and the Entity JavaDoc. And I think it'll solve your problem pretty neatly!

you can use the sample project that the google plugin for eclipse create for you. Then you can easily replace the generated java code by groovy / gaelyk code. Note that you need to add the jars in the war/WEB-INF/lib of your project, and add them in the project build path options.

! In this blog post we learn how easy it is to deploy a simple Groovlet to the Google Appengine and how easy it is to parse JSON results.

build-time substitution. Here’s our appengine-web.xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <appengine-web-app xmlns="http://appengine.google.com/ns/1.0"> <application>${gae.app.name}</application> <version>${friendlyversion}</version> <system-properties> <property name="java.util.logging.config.file" value="WEB-INF/logging.properties"/> </system-properties> </appengine-web-app>

At build time, I use the AntRun plugin (lines 97-118) to create a small file under the target directory that holds a ‘sanitized’ version of the standard Maven version. (I.e. “1.0-SNAPSHOT” becomes GAE-friendly “1-0-snapshot”.) I then use the Maven filter functionality available in the WAR plugin (lines 80-96) to copy the appengine-web.xml into its proper directory with the version substituted in.

3. Adds a new gae:start goal. This is identical to gae:run, except that it does not automatically execute the package phase before starting the server. The intent is to use this in a project POM, but it can also be used to start the server quickly when you don't want to rebuild the project. Right now I just copied the RunGoal completely, except for the '@execute phase="package"' declaration, because I didn't want to introduce conflicts in case someone else is editing RunGoal.java. A better thing to do in the future would be to have RunGoal extend StartGoal with an empty class that just adds the '@execute phase="package"' annotation (it can't be the other way around, with StartGoal extending Run goal, because there's no way to override a mojo with an @execute annotation with one that doesn't have it---it gets inherited automatically).

The idea behind all of these changes is to make it so that you can use the maven-gae-plugin in a project's POM for automated integration tests. The gae:start goal automatically binds to the pre-integration-test phase by default, and the gae:stop goal binds to post-integration-test. This is most useful when combined with something like the maven-failsafe-plugin and a functional testing library like HtmlUnit that you can use to simulate web requests. It would also be useful for Selenium testing.

About loading request/performance, there're lots of discussions that you can find in the groups, please just try google it. Here are some notes based on reading those. Latency causes by 1- time to start new JVM 2- time to load your application To reduce load time by 1) others star request to a) pay to reserve JVM b) request Google to load your app before start dispatch request to that instance c) accept the situation For 2) we try to a- try to use/replace frameworks with light-weight ones: datastore access framework, MVC framework,... b- try to limit calculation in your index page to alleviate the impact of loading request c- design your object model based on your need, so that you do calculation at insert time, not at query time. For example, in my app, if I want to report on year and quarter, then I have 5 summary "record" for those, instead of querying and computing those d- caching result. For example, If I know 1 one 5 piece of data above would be read frequently, then I will read those 5 all, and put into memcache for later use ... So it's application-specific, I don't know if each of above can help you. But only you who can know if which one of your code can be cached and how...

Personally, I would recommend using the blobstore API for this since it is officially supported by google and means it won't break in the future. It also has nice bindings into the imageservice. http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/blobstore/overview.html