Google Cloud Endpoints logo

Lately, we’ve been playing with Google Cloud Endpoints and want to share with you a little tutorial on the basics of this technology. In a series of three posts we plan to teach you how to construct a simple web backend storing data and then expose it by means of a public REST-based API. Don’t be afraid of the technical slang. It’s easier than it seems! These first part of the tutorial deals with setting the environment. In the second part of the tutorial, we explain how to create the core application. Finally, the third post in the series explains how to interact with our application.

According to Google Developers Documentation, Google Cloud Endpoints consists of tools, libraries and capabilities that allow you to generate APIs and client libraries from an App Engine application, referred to as an API backend, to simplify client access to data from other applications. Endpoints makes it easier to create a web backend for web clients and mobile clients such as Android or Apple’s iOS.

Basically, with Google Cloud Endpoints we can define data objects and provide a set of web operations to query/insert/delete/update them. The instances of these data objects can be stored in Google’s AppEngine datastore or in an alternative data management system. Since our WordPress Conversion Optimization service deals with posts (among other elements), I’ve decided to construct a very straightforward Cloud application that stores posts in the AppEngine DataStore and provides an Endpoint to access these data.

I suppose that you are familiar with Java programming and the Eclipse development environment. If that’s not your case, I recommend you to start with this good tutorial by Lars Vogel.

Firstly, we need to download and install the Google Plugin for Eclipse.  You will find the URL to download the right version of the plugin that works with your version of Eclipse here. If you are using Eclipse Juno, which is the last version that you can download when this post has been written, follow the steps Google describes here.

Basically, start Eclipse, then select Help > Install New Software…. In the dialog that appears, enter the update site URL (http://dl.google.com/eclipse/plugin/4.2 for Eclipse Juno) into the Work with text box and press Enter key.


Installation of Google Plugin for Eclipse

Select the checkbox next to Google Plugin for Eclipse(required), and also select the checkbox next to Google App Engine Engine Java SDK, which is under the SDKs container. That way you will install the Google Plugin for Eclipse and the required libraries to work with Google App Engine.

Then click Next, click OK on the Security Warning, read and accept the license agreements, and then click Finish. You will then be asked if you would like to restart Eclipse. Click on Restart. Now you are ready to build App Engine web applications and awesome backends for your applications! If you encountered issues during the installation, send us a comment and we will help you.

Stay tuned for the next part of this tutorial where we’ll go deeper on Google Cloud Endpoints.

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