Google Application Engine Launches
Last night Google launched their Application Engine. Nocturnal developer enthusiasts, get excited. It allows you to built applications that are hosted by Google’s robust infrastructure. This is fairly significant strategic change, not simply for the fact that it allows people to create ubiquitous web applications that never fall over and have unlimited space but because Google seem to have actually employed a trained designer to create a logo.
At the risk of sounding overly simplistic, it’s actually a bit like the way in which Facebook allows you to build applications. For most web developers the feature list will look positively erotic, however, one fairly massive drawback is that you need to know Python. Having said that, Python is one of the more simple syntaxes (there was talk of merging it with Ruby at one time). It will be a massive boon for the Python developer community. Hopefully they will ad new languages at some point, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
The level of integration with Google’s own apps is yet to be seen. And I’m yet to discover if they have a service level agreement (SLA) - this was the biggest drawback of the Amazon cloud as this prohibits application developers from providing any level of service for their own customers.
I’m tired of launches that are limited betas. Only 10000 developers will get a first kick.
They say that they “look forward to supporting more languages in the future” - I won’t bet on Ruby though. Maybe Erlang.. :P`
The main benefit here is largely that it’s free, but it isn’t particularly flexible (yet?) which makes it mostly useless for most devs. You can’t simply port apps to it, you’ll have to develop specifically for their platform. I guess that’s not going to be too horrible if you’re a python dev but it isn’t even simple in that case.