Google’s Cloud Platform is slowly becoming ay fully featured environment for running complex web apps, but it’s not easy to just give it a quick try. To get started with Cloud Platform, after all, you have to first install the right SDK and other tools on your local machine. Today, however, Google is launching its browser-based Cloud Playground, which is meant to give developers a chance to try some sample code and see how actual production APIs will behave, or to just share some code with colleagues without them having to install your whole development environment.
Cloud Playground, Google says, is meant to be a place “for developers to experiment and play with some of the services offered by the Google Cloud Platform, such as Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage and Google Cloud SQL.”
For now, Cloud Playground only supports Python 2.7 App Engine apps, and Google considers it to be an experimental service (so it could shut it down anytime).
To get started, you simply head for the Cloud Playground or, if you just want to see it at work, head for Google’s getting started documentation, which now features green Run/Modify buttons that allow you to run any of the sample code on these sites. The Cloud Playground itself features numerous sample apps and also gives you the option to clone other open source App Engine template projects written in Python 2.7 from GitHub.
The project itself is open source and consists of a basic browser-based code editor and mimic, a Python App Engine app that serves as the development server.
