Paul McDonald, who has been wonderful in working closely with me to make sure that the Singularity web site got up and running on Google App Engine last week, announced on the Google App Engine Blog on Thursday that they had released a new version of the Google App Engine SDK. Version 1.1.1 includes several small updates and I just upgraded to it without issues.

That said, Issue 401 is still unpatched, so if you're running Python 2.5 (not 2.5.1+), you will need to apply the patch.

Along with Thursday's release, Google has also upped the number of applications that you can create with a single account to ten. That's great news. Due to the 1,000 file/blob limit on projects, it makes sense to split your applications up over several different applications.

I actually like this limitation as it forces me to think more modularly about my applications.

For the new Singularity web site, for example, I set up opencountrycodes as an API for handling ISO Alpha-2 country codes. And I just added the FAMFAMFAM country flag icons to it. There are 140+ flag images in there so it was causing the main app to reach its 1,000 file limit. Now, anyone can access them from opencountrycodes (e.g., http://opencountrycodes.appspot.com/images/flags/gb.png = ) and my main app is nowhere near its file limit.

Ten applications give you 10,000 files to play with. Which should be fine for most people (and if you legitimately need more, well, you can always set up another account.)

The Google Appengine team has also improved the Dashboard usage graphs (you can now zoom in to 24, 12, and 6 hour graphs) and you can download your logs in plain text.

(This gives me hope that some sort of datastore backup may be next.)

Another huge change is that you can now send email as the currently-logged-in user. Previously, you could only send email from the administrator account which was a severe limitation for any sort of social application.

OpenID time for App Engine?

I haven't had a chance to see if Issue 404 and Issue 363, which were reported as fixed in notes to the issue tracker and which are essential to getting OpenID to work on Google App Engine have been incorporated into this release.

If these fixes have been included, we should be able to get Appengine apps to consume OpenID.