Yesterday, Google announced the general availability of Google App Engine, another option for deploying Cloud Software.

Google App Engine is a great place to create and share extensions for MindTouch Deki. By design, Deki is a distributed application platform that can be extended in any programming language, including C#, PHP, Java, Python, and the built-in DekiScript runtime. Sharing these extensions can be difficult though since you need to find a place to host them. This is were Google App Engine comes in.

Getting started is incredibly simple:

1. Download the App Engine SDK.
2. Create a new application.
3. Add the DekiExt.py file to it.

After that, creating your own extension only takes a few lines of code:

class MyExtension(DekiExt):

    # title for the extension
    def title(self): return "My Extension"

    # a function is exported in the XML manifest
    @function("str", "return user greeting")
    @param("str", "name of user")
    def hello(self, name):
        return "Hi " + name

Now upload your extension to your Google App Engine account and voilà, anybody can now benefit from it!

To invoke from MindTouch Deki, just register your extension in the control panel. Now your users can access it by simply typing:

{{ hello("Bob") }}

To learn more how to write your own extensions using Google App Engine, check out the tutorial. Then drop by the developer forums to share your work, ask questions, and provide suggestions. Enjoy!

categories: Community, Deki Wiki, MindTouch, Tutorial |