Confused about Google App Engine and Google Cloud Endpoints

Question

I am building my mobile apps (Android and iOS). I am not sure if I understand this correctly, but it seems Cloud Endpoints allow you to develop and deploy your own APIs, while App Engine assists you in building a server application? It seems App Engine also allows you to build a web application backend that exposes REST service APIs? So it can do whatever Cloud Endpoints can do? If I use Cloud Endpoints, can my APIs interact with some kind of DB? Is there anything I can do in App Engine but cannot do in Cloud Endpoints in the context of building a REST backend for mobile apps?

I understand this question is messy.. but Google does seems to have confusing documentations there. Thanks!

Answer 1

App Engine is just a compute platform on which Cloud Endpoints enabled apps can run. Cloud Endpoints provides frameworks which make writing a RESTful API easier (Java, Python), while also providing features to help you manage your APIs and access them from generated client libraries. You can use Cloud Endpoints in conjunction with a database of your choosing. The Cloud Endpoints frameworks previously linked essentially make it easy to map HTTP paths to methods, which do whatever you want.

Answer 2

Cloud Endpoints is basically just a framework to make REST APIs on GAE. This is the part you are looking for, "...developers can use services and features available in App Engine standard environment, such as Datastore, Google Cloud Storage, Mail, Url Fetch, Task Queues, and so forth."

So to answer your question, just use Cloud Endpoints if you making an API for your Android app, it's much easier.