App Engine 1.6.3 Released | Hacker News Reader

App Engine 1.6.3 Released

googleappengine.blogspot.com.au

21 pointsevolution695 comments

This release has plenty of exciting changes to keep you busy on your extra day this year.

Well, the ease of implementing A/B testing should keep patio11 happy... I've noticed he seems almost religiously fanatical about it, and probably for good reason! Looking back at a quick search, it seems he's been doing it for several years...

Hopefully it will go further than what he's anticipating: And yet when we check back on who A/B tests here in February 2013, do you know what we're going to see? A few articles about it, with wise comments like "A/B testing can only get you to a local maxima" and "Didn't we read an article just like this on Smashing Magazine in 2006?", and fairly few companies who actually have someone do it every week, even among the savvier folks.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3639365

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3646669

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1404083

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=764508

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=484668

It is also good for staging new version of apps that you only want some users to have access to. I have been doing this manually by having the new version called 'staging' and setting it in the user session to redirect.

You could also use this for browser testing, where your test client sends a header that will redirect it to a clean datastore with the new version

I posted about it yesterday http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3647991

OOT: Maybe I'm hellbanned so my submissions are not visible (I don't think I wrote anything illegal so far, but after the hellban discussions, I'm always afraid "it might happen to me anytime without warning"). How do I check that without creating new account to see how other users see me?

Hellbanned users' comments are only visible to themselves and users who enable showdead, so they disappear when you clear your cookies or logout. You aren't, by the way. Blogspot just didn't send a redirect to canonicalize the slightly differing URLs, so HN doesn't know they're really the same posting.

I was talking about continuous deployment with some colleagues earlier and we were wondering whether we'd be able to deploy a version of the app to only a subset of our users on app engine.

We didn't think it would be possible, but it looks like this Traffic Splitting feature could be (ab)used to make it happen after all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com