To use App Engine, you need a Google Account. Once you have your Google Account, you can enable App Engine services by entering in your cell phone number and carrier on the App Engine setup page. Google will send you an SMS with an access code you need to enter into the website. This activation scheme is Google’s way of restricting you from creating multiple App Engine accounts.

When you have received your code via SMS and entered your activation code, you can begin creating applications. The following appears after you have activated your App Engine account.

When you click “Create an Application” you can enter an application alias where your new application will be hosted on the appspot.com domain.

If your alias is available, you can then create an application and deploy to your new cloud application. In this example, we created the alias “pearlcompanies”.

Since we’re running in a windows environment, our next step is to setup Eclipse and the Google Plugin for Eclipse to deploy to our cloud application. We used Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo) in our example. After unpacking the Eclipse folder contents, we tell Eclipse where to get the Google Plugin. We add the available software site “http://dl.google.com/eclipse/plugin/3.5″ to our Eclipse Preferences.

Download and Install both the Google Eclipse plugin and GWT and App Engine SDKs.

After installing the Google SDKs, we can create Google App Engine projects (Web Application Projects). The nice thing here is that we can run the cloud application locally and verify it before deploying remotely to the cloud. The Google SDK comes with the components necessary to simulate the cloud environment.

Once we have our web project, we can begin creating our WAR package for deployment into the App Engine cloud service. The current App Engine supports Java and Python environments, but in this example we are going to use the Java runtime. Since we’re demonstrating deployment here, we are not going to use any servlets, but simply an HTML front-end. After changing the index.html page in our web project, we click the App Engine icon in the Eclipse toolbar.

After clicking the icon, we are prompted with the deployment wizard which has our Google account credentials and a link to the App Engine project settings. Click the project settings and enter the Application ID and version for the application (use the alias we setup previously).

Click ‘Ok’ on the properties dialog, and then enter your login credentials. Once you click ‘Deploy’, your application will be pushed into the Google App Engine cloud. You can view and manage your applications that are live in the Google App Engine site.

You can view the clone of our Pearl Companies website which we deployed to pearlcompanies.appspot.com. Please let us know about your App Engine experiences. We look forward to using this new powerful platform.