Google launches App Engine

Filed under: Developer, Internet, News, Web services, Google, Open Source, Beta, web 2.0

Google launches App Engine

by Christina Warren Apr 8th 2008

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

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Generic said 5:05AM on 4-08-2008

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

kingkool68 said 2:06PM on 4-08-2008

I got one of those 10,000 invites last night. I don't really know what to do with it now though.

Peter Melnikov said 3:53PM on 4-08-2008

Google rocks. Very nice move! The rush started not only in USA but caught the attention worldwide. Here at MoveYourWeb (based in Eastern Europe - offshore outsourcing destination) we are working on several demo applications already and should ship in 1-3 days.

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