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Google Cloud Endpoints

Saturday March 23rd I attended an interactive Google Lab @ Codemotion 2013 in Rome held by Alfredo Morresi about the Google Cloud Endpoints. This is a new feature for Google App Engine (GAE). It consists of tools, libraries and capabilities that allow you to generate Endpoints and client libraries from an App Engine backend to simplify client access to that web app. Endpoints makes it easier to create a web backend for web clients and mobile clients such as Android or Apple's iOS. Mobile developers will spare a lot of time and work while developing shared backends for their apps and benefit from all the services and features provided by the GAE infrastructure. The figure below shows the basic Endpoints architecture:

The backend is an App Engine application that performs business logic and other functions for Android and iOS clients, as well as JavaScript web clients. The functionality of the backend is made available to clients through Endpoints, which exposes an API that clients can call.
The development process is very easy. You need the Google App Engine Java SDK 1.7.5 or later or the Eclipse plugin which includes the SDK itself. The general workflow is the following:

  1. Write your App Engine backend code as usual.
  2. Annotate your App Engine backend code, so classes and client libraries can be generated from it.
  3. Generate the client library using the Google Plugin for Eclipse.
  4. Write your client app, using the client library when making calls to the App Engine backend via the Endpoint.
The GAE website warns developers about the current experimental state of this new feature. This doesn't mean that it is unstable, but only that if you don't upgrade your SDK to the latest version you could find some backward incompatibilities in the future.
In the next post I will show you a real example and how it's really easy to implement an Endpoint and generate the client consumer code.
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