GAE has a development server that you can use for imitating the "GAE cloud" in local, non-production environments. According to the docs, it mimics all Service API calls.

I'm curious as to how it works with respect to the NoSQL Datastore API. Is there a way to configure your GAE dev server to work with a local database (so you can feed it dummy data that is meaningful to your test cases)? If so how does this work as it is not documented anywhere that I can tell! Thanks in advance!