The Google App Engine is the talk of the town this week giving developers access to Google infrastructure and Google customers. If you haven’t heard about it you may be an ostrich and need to read some of these. If you didn’t get one of the 10k beta invites, no worries- you can still play with it. We just made it significantly easier to tinker by releasing a JumpBox for the Google App Engine SDK. This is a freebie and it comes pre-registered so you download it and fire it up and you’re playing with App Engine in minutes. You can leave comments/feedback on it here. And this is our “official” announcement:

Google recently announced a new cloud based application deployment system called Google App Engine. We found this to be a pretty interesting system and since the SDK they released is Open Source we decided to put together a JumpBox for it.
It’s a great solution if you want to play with the Google App Engine SDK without really installing it on your system. It’s also perfect as an integration point for a small team working together on a Google App Engine project.

Google made it possible to build applications for App Engine using several different mechanisms and the JumpBox comes with CGI, Google Webapp and Django environments setup and ready for development. It’s also a really great way to just kick the tires of the different frameworks before committing to development.

Also, since this is a JumpBox our backup system is included which allows you to backup your source code and development data to network shares or Amazon S3.