About PicSoup

I've been working on PicSoup (a GWT Google App Engine application) for a few months now (on and off) and as it turns out it's quite a good show case for a lot of the App Engine Services:

• Datastore - using Objectify instead of cumbersome JDO or JPA
• Memcache - explicit use and Objectify annotation driven
• Mail - both incoming picture submission and outgoing notifications
• Images - resize the incoming pics before storing them
• Google Accounts - for authentication, user management and admin access
• Task Queues - used to offload competition state change processing and email notifications
• Blobstore - uploaded images are temporarily stored here before resizing
• Scheduled tasks - cron triggers change the competition state on a weekly basis
• Administration Console Custom Pages - GWT admin controls
• Appstats - used to improve performance

As well as the main front-end PicSoup has an automatically detected mobile front-end so it looks good on your Android or iPhone device. It also has a Google Gadget - see top right of this blog!