Google App Engine

I just wanted to drop a line here about the recent release of the Google App Engine. If you are curious to know what it is then have a look at the introduction to the application environment here. Google App Engine ist "Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google's infrastructure", quote from the project's documentation home. The goal is the following: you as a user develop your application that should run on the Google App Engine runtime environment. For this you can use the development environment that is delivered by google for that purpose. For the moment it only supports Python but is destined to be extended to other programming/Scripting languages. I personnaly am a great fan of python, which I have bee using for 4 years now, and it's number 2 for after JAVA. But the language I would love to see is ruby, another language I am a big fan of. After the application has been developed you can run it on the net using the Google App Engine (from the appspot.com domain) or use Google Apps to serve the application from your own domain [source: project's documentation home]. Google App Engine provides you with a scalable infrastructure for your project to run:

• dynamic web serving,
  
• persistent storage with transactions, automatic scaling and load balancing (500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month [source: project's documentation home])
• APIs for authenticating users and sending email using Google Accounts
  
• and a local development environment that simulates Google App Engine on your computer [source: project's documentation home].

So for lightweight web applications destined to serve a huge number of people, typically community applications like social bookmarking or community buzzing and such, Google App Engine is a quite advantageous offer, since it is free (paying versions with enhanced load and storage capabilities are expected) and offers you a quick solution to develop, test run and deploy your web apps for a huge number of people and without server management costs. But if you want to have a classical Portal or a complex web app, and you are a fan of Python like me, then don't miss out on Zope.

Finally I would like to put some attentions on sebastian's blog article, where he reports on attempts to use the GAE (Google App Engine) and draws some conclusions about the use of it from a practical point of view. Note that it is in German.

Marwane El Kharbili