Google launches App Engine

Google has just announced the preview release of Google App Engine, which the company is describing as " an application-hosting tool that developers can use to build scalable web apps on top of Google's infrastructure." Think of it like Amazon's web services, but as a fully integrated solution. With Amazon's services, developers can mix and match the various components with each other or with other solutions -- Google App Engine is a one-stop shop of sorts.

Most appealing, Google App Engine is free. During the preview, there are only spots for the first 10,000 developers who sign up, but Google's information page says that free accounts will be available after the initial preview. Of course, the free accounts do have resource limitations (500MB of storage and 5 million page views a month), but free is free!

Let's get into the details:

Applications can be served from the free appspot.com domain or from an external domain via Google Apps
Python is the only language supported right now -- Google says they look forward to supporting other languages in the future, but for right now -- Python is where it is at
Google's service API is built into App Engine -- so Google Accounts can be easily integrated into an application
During the developer preview users are able to register up to 3 applications
The SDK is available for Mac, Windows and Linux
From our perspective, this news is exciting -- if not for what it offers right now -- but for the potential in the future. Only initially supporting Python is a curious choice (though we are big fans of Django), but the ability for developers to execute scalable apps using Google's resources -- for free -- is extremely exciting.

[via TechCrunch]
Tags: app engine, AppEngine, django, google, python, web apps, WebApps

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

14-08-2008 @ 5:05AM

Generic said...
Python is a really good choice. It has many IDEs and compilers that compile to bytecode, hence catching some errors early on. Look at all what AJAX trys to do that it was not initially designed for. Programming without an IDE or a way to systematically test the code without running it all together.

Add to that Python is terribly easy to learn and very high level. It is supposed to be an OOP language but you can write procedural code too. The most important part is that there are many modules with ready made and tested code which will be a plus for servers that want to minimize what code you will want to run. If you had a module that does XML parsing efficiently, then you will save server time by not forcing Google to run your code (no offence) that might be slow.

And I'm biased because I like Python :D

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Asked by neeraj_kholiya

Hi All
I have a basic doubt in app engine program . I have a step in app engine program . Rhich contains two action . One is do select ( its properties are restartable) and then a peoplecode . Sometime it may happen that appengine can go to no success due to peoplecode . after that when I am trying to restart it . It starts from application engine main not from do select statement which ideally should be . Did I miss anything in it ? My State record is a sql table ..

Regards
Neeraj