Google App Engine Dashboard on Android

We created and published a simple Android application for monitoring applications hosted on Google's App Engine infrastructure.

App Engine Dashboard - runs on your Android device

 
GAE has a decent web-based dashboard but it lacks an official dashboard for mobile platforms. I thought it would be cool if I could check out the details of my GAE apps right on my phone. The result is App Engine Dashboard.

We use Google App Engine for our games and personally I am very passionate about it. Don't Mind the Mine, for instance, uses GAE to persist high-scores of players and to send force close (unhandled exception) reports to us via e-mail. Anyway, it is an awesome infrastructure.

Regarding its implementation there were two interesting things - at least for me. There is no official API for accessing information about applications running on GAE. I had to use good old regular expressions to collect information from the web-based dashboard. HTTP requests plus regexp. That's it. The other thing is that I don't wanted to ask users for their Google password just to make them able to use my application. But this was easily solved thanks to Android platform. Users can allow the application to use Google accounts added already to the phone. Using only an authentication token without knowing the password. However using that auth. token to authenticate against GAE was not so trivial but it is an another story... :)

So far App Engine Dashboard is not too feature rich. You can watch quota details and set warning/critical percentage levels for them. I have all kind of other features in mind. One could monitor lot of other stuff, receive auto-notifications or even not only monitor but control the app. If you have something in your mind just let me know - feedbacks are welcome.

To try it download it from the Android Market. And, by the way, it has no ads at all and is completely free.