« Intro: References
a-z.ch
Regional market place with an integrated news portal.
meinBerlin.de
The resizeable city magazine for Berlin.
zehn.de
Top-10 lists for men, written by experts.
zoomer.de
The news portal for the young generation.

zehn.de

It's one thing to write a Web application using Google App Engine. But can you run an entire Web portal based on it? We say yes! Take a look at Zehn.de.
The Customer
The Developer
Bastian Stein & Thomas Pyczak
CHIP Communications GmbH
Download for iPod
MP4 Video, 49.4 MB
Bernd Dorn
Developer at Lovely Systems
Download for iPod
MP4 Video, 29.4 MB

Zehn.de (German for ten; not zen ;-) is the first major Web portal in Germany to completely run on cloud computing services. A trailblazing application and a shining example of Google App Engine Development done by Lovely Systems for CHIP Communications.

Why is Zehn.de so trailblazing? Technically it is one of the most complex applications so far on Google App Engine. Zehn.de comes with a full-blown Content Management System for Editorial Content, User Generated Content is created with an easy to use front-end list editor. The Backoffice User Interface was implemented with "GXT" (GWT implementation of Ext JS). Registered users can create their own custom top 10 lists via a convenient editor, which is also implemented using Google Web Toolkit.

BLOBs (i.e. images) are stored on Amazon S3. Static files like CSS and Javascript are delivered using Amazon's Content Delivery Network. File-Uploads are handled directly by Amazon S3, due to GAE's request limits. Amazon EC2 is used for image processing and various maintenance tasks such as creating snapshots of big table data and triggering asynchronous jobs on the application.

And what's it all about? Top-10 lists for men, written by experts. The site is clearly structured and comes in a unique design (coverflow showroom), lists are accompanied by additional information like data, photos and videos. Users can comment, rate, re-sort existing lists and even publish their own lists. The ten most unnecessary video game sequals of all time, the ten best novels of the Seventies, the ten most influential songwriters hardly anybody knows? Find out at www.zehn.de!