The Google App Engine JumpBox gives you a drop in place system for doing Google App Engine development that’s contained in an isolated environment within a virtual machine.
It runs exactly the same on GNU/Linux, Mac and other OS’s and gives you a development environment that lets you take advantage of great virtualization features like snapshots. It will run from a single download on Parallels Desktop, VMWare, Virtual Iron, Xen Open Source in fully virtualized mode and others.