GQL, Google's AppEngine query language is a very limited subset of SQL.

- No "not equal" (!= or <>)
- No "OR" clauses

This presumably optimizes returning the results from a distributed table in storage.

My first Google App Engine application is now deployed! Not much more than "hello world", but this was so easy!

click to play

Watching the Campfire One video for launch of Google App Engine (PREVIEW RELEASE)

Quoted: Google App Engine enables developers to build their web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications.

(this will likely be edited together later - but now they are individual 10 minute videos)

Part 2: http://youtube.com/watch?v=tcbpTQXNwac (Shout Demo)
Part 3: http://youtube.com/watch?v=oG6Ac7d-Nx8
Part 4: http://youtube.com/watch?v=oTFL7FPLnXY (Guido)
Part 5: http://youtube.com/watch?v=JcM2Ejk1tis (Application Console)
Part 6: http://youtube.com/watch?v=K7usoKm5zwE

The sample app - live - from the Google AppEngine video.

Holy crap - Django is integrated into the App Engine release....

Quoted: Google App Engine includes Django 0.96, so if you are on the latest stable release, there's nothing to install. Just import your Django modules as you would normally. We cover the modifications you will need to include if you are using the Django development version as well.

Good explanation of the AppEngine on their (first) blog post:

* Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies
* Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions)
* Automatic scaling and load balancing
* Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email
* Fully featured local development environment

During this preview period, applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. We expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million pageviews per month. In the future, these limited quotas will remain free, and developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed.

Also see Campfire One transcript here:
http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/cf1-text.html

and video:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=3Ztr-HhWX1c

Claim is that Django is supported! Doesn't Django depend on a SQL datastore under the covers? Is there release that supports the AppEngine DataStore API?

A Campfire-like web based chat interface, written using Google's AppEngine by Braden Kowtiz and Darren Delaye (neither one a Google "engineer", I gather from the chat going on now).

Quoted: Darren Delaye, Braden Kowitz, Kyle Consalus

Documentation site for Google's AppEngine. SDK now available for download and offline development.

It's all Python based - the SDK includes a dedicated web server as well. So you can develop and run your application locally, and then deploy it to Google's AppEngine when you're ready (and when they have given out developer keys - now it is locked down to 10,000 early beta developers).