How to break news on Google App Engine

Yesterday, I gave a five-minute lightning talk at the NICAR conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. I talked briefly about how our team at latimes.com has used Google App Engine to host some simple Django applications. You can see the slides above.

We also took the opportunity to announce a few open-source releases related to App Engine. They are:

• latimes-appengine-template: A simple library for bootstrapping a Google App Engine project with Django and the other goodies we like already installed.
• latimes-table-stacker: A white-label App Engine app that will publish spreadsheets as interactive tables. It plays off great libraries by Jeff Larson and Chris Amico. You can see the demo here and our version at spreadsheets.latimes.com.
• latimes-document-stacker: A white label version of our DocumentCloud repository at documents.latimes.com, which is also hosted on App Engine. It's inspired by some great code by Joe Germuska.