Google has confirmed that it has released a new version of its App Engine platform for developing web applications. First released to the community back in early 2008, the new 1.4.3 version is said to bring the Java and Python runtimes even closer to parity.
The search giant says that a key feature of the new release will be Prospective Search -- a new service intended to allow developers to build services that function like the Google Alerts content monitoring service. If Google has got it right with this release, then massive amounts of data can be sent to Prospective Search and it will alert the user when that data matches.
According to the official Google App Engine Blog, “An application could include a simple web crawler which visits all sites on the web and passes them to Prospective Search. At the same time, subscriptions on terms to watch for can be set, such as ‘App Engine’. When the crawler finds a page that contains App Engine, Prospective Search will execute specified code and action can be taken: send an email, record something in the database, etc.”
Google also points out that the “experimental” Prospective Search API is designed to allow Python runtime users to detect and take action on datastore entities that match certain criteria when they are written. For the experimental release, users will be allowed 10,000 subscriptions with the Prospective Search API.
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