The more I use it (and see minimial improvements), the more I'm sure AppEngine is a stale project, kept alive by the potential wrath of the internet if they canned it.
[edit] I'll give them credit, They've redone the console. But it's terrible. And you still need the old one to do things such as turn on cloud-storage.
App Engine is very far from dead, either in the "time to turn off the service" or the "it's destaffed but the servers still run" use of the term. App Engine is well-staffed and, AFAICT, is actually growing. They're working extremely hard on getting system reliability to a place where they want it to be. [1] seems to indicate the fruits of that labor, paying off in the last month or so. Now, reliability means reliable for _all_ their customers, from the one person bedroom coder to SnapChat. They have had a big task meeting the requirements of everyone.
I can't talk to the bug triaging system of App Engine nor their future plans. That said, work continues apace to get Managed VMs [2] out of beta, and it seems like a pretty exciting new road which may be a custom better fit for larger companies.
[1] https://status.cloud.google.com/summary [2] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managed-vms/
They update the SDK quite regularly: https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/wiki/SdkReleaseNot...
They rarely handle bugs well. The linked issue is typical. They don't even need to do any work to do a whole lot better; they just need to give developers an indication about what to expect. That does mean that they need to make decisions internally, which might be the problem. Potentially, management is umm'ing & arr'ing about whether to kill App Engine.
They recently threw a bit of a contribution in the direction of AppScale, but it's difficult to read that. It could be to soften the blow in the event of discontinuation, or it could be to remove the perception of App Engine as a service with no alternative.
There have also been new features recently introduced, albeit projects that seem like they should have lower prioritization than ensuring folk can use SSL with App Engine, or use modern versions of their programming language. For example, this recent addition: http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/using-goo...
My reading of the situation is that Google Cloud folk have resources (headcount) to do routine maintenance on App Engine, but not embark on any infrastructural advancements, like new versions of Python & Java, or significant new functionality.
Sounds like their answer for Java8 is probably the same for Python3:
"To echo comment #66, App Engine in fact is not going away. To the contrary, we're investing heavily, and the new hosting environment that is based on containerized virtual machines (what we're currently calling "App Engine Managed VMs") allows you to utilize Java 8 as well as Servlet 3.x."
This is no longer correct. As a long-time GAE user, I was one of the last holdouts on the old console. Recently, however, I spun up a large new project - and discovered that I haven't needed (or wanted to use) the old console at all. Including for GCS.
The new console is vastly more usable than the AWS console, and significantly more useful than Heroku's. Just the logging system alone is priceless.
webapp2 was started outside of Google by Rodrigo Moraes, who has since moved on to other projects. Googlers have contributed to the webapp2 but have never taken the lead.
There are probably dozens of WSGI-compatible web frameworks that are under active development and you can choose any one that you like.