Playground in Google Cloud

Hello Cloud Playground - Online Google Cloud experience for Python coders The development team behind Google's Cloud Platform has announced the release of a Cloud Playground. It enables interested developers to try out code samples and APIs without having to install the platform SDK or any other tools which might be needed. It should also make it easier to share code with colleagues using different development environments.

Cloud Playground runs in a browser and is currently limited to App Engine apps written in Python 2.7. The project is open source and comprises two modules, mimic and bliss. Mimic is an app which works with the Python App Engine and acts as the development server, similar to the SDK's dev_appserver. It, however, runs in the production App Engine environment, providing access to the production APIs and the environment. Bliss is a browser-based code editor enabling developers to edit code in the mimic virtual filesystem, which is backed by the App Engine datastore.

To soften the learning curve, App Engine's getting started documentation now includes green Run/Modify buttons. By clicking on these buttons, developers can edit and execute sample code. More template code and instructions for importing other open source App Engine projects written in Python 2.7 from GitHub can be found on the Cloud Playground web site.

The project is currently marked as experimental and the web page notes that, as it is a shared playground, all projects, files and data can be read, edited or deleted at any time.

(djwm)