Some of you may already have noticed or heard me saying that GAE-Studio was going to be open sourced and I think it is past overdue to officially announce it: GAE-Studio is now open source under Apache 2 and freely available! We promise to keep working on it, and to make that possible, we’re going to add GAE-Studio support to our open source support packages. You can find the source code under our Arcbees github organization as well as on maven central. We released an official, stable version 1.0 a couple of days ago that you can see in action on our demo website. You can also read our documentation to learn more about how to install GAE-Studio in your Google App Engine application.

Some may wonder why we chose to open source what was going to be our first official product. We’ve first started this venture almost 3 years ago when Arcbees was still in its inception. We were using Google App Engine heavily, and the lack of a good datastore admin console was a big problem. At the time, Google App Engine didn’t have any hooks on which we could build one, so we hacked our way around and built something useful for our own work. One year later, after finding other users were feeling the same pain as we did using Google App Engine, we set out to improve GAE-Studio user experience. It was planned to be our very first product that wasn’t going to be open sourced.

Last summer, Google IO announced a new console for Google App Engine that removed much of the pain that GAE-Studio was designed to help with. Then some time later, Objectify-Insight came out, and our visualization engine would be in competition with it. Since we love and have been using Objectify for years, we didn’t want to become their commercial competitor.

Still, we were and are hopeful that GAE-Studio will be useful for our developers. For one thing, GAE-Studio is available to all environments using the Modules, although it was initially written for the Java runtime. This is because Google now provides hooks in the Google App Engine SDK for the things we had to hack our way around to in the past. The further advantage of GAE-Studio is that it can be used locally! While Google has improved the usability of their cloud console a lot, the usability of local development tools is still weak.

Several hundred users have expressed an interest in using GAE-Studio, and we are now ready to officially release it in their hands. We hope you will find GAE-Studio useful, and will help us support the remaining runtime.

Thanks for the support and words of encouragement, and thanks for sticking with us through this venture!

About GAE-Studio

GAE Studio helps you optimize applications hosted on Google App Engine.

GAE Studio also allows datastore exploration, modification, deletion, import and export. Think of it as your swiss army knife for developing GAE applications!

Using real-time analysis of datastore requests, GAE Studio quickly highlights inefficient queries and gathers metrics that will help developers improve application performance.