Must come from somewhere deep inside the Google Large intestines. Only that would explain them starting off with Python for crying out loud! Nothing wrong with Python but there were so many other more popular options... - Kamath
..."Google’s initial focus on Python makes sense because they use Python internally as their scripting language (and they hired Python creator Guido van Rossum in 2005)."... - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008... - Stoyan Zhekov
@Stoyan, yup, I gathered that much. But that seems to be guided more by what Google uses internally rather than what the target-developers would rather use. I guess it goes with the territory given the way these projects take birth at Google. No complaints though. The internals are all language neutral and they promise support for other langs. Hopefully sooner rather than later. I also wouldn't whine so much if I was a Python guy ;) - Kamath
It's competition to Amazon EC2's webserver-(mis-)use. It's NOT competition to Amazon S3. Amazon didn't build EC2 to power web servers, at least not so far. Google disrupts the web-server-business and will cause big trouble for the established players, because they do all the difficult stuff automatically. It still requires quite an effort to get Amazon EC2 to do what Google AppEngine does. OMG, I'm excited! - sebmos
This is interesting, although I think Amazon's AWS continues to be more interesting. AWS let's me continue to work, more or less, the way I want to work - as a model it disrupts datacenters/ISPs. It needs more ease of use, but it's getting there. AppEngine is more of a framework (maybe a meta-framework) with those pros and cons. You do things the Google Way and life is quite good. You don't want to and your kinda SOL. If you want off AppEngine, it isn't clear how easy it will be do de-google your app. - felix
@sebmos that's excatly what I was thinkin - EC2 sounds cool but it's still a pain in the ass to maintain it. Hope that PHP will be released soon... - Alexander Marktl
I played around with it a bit this evening and wrote a blog system on which I posted my thoughts about writing it: http://bret.appspot.com/. I worked on the project for a bit at Google, so I am obviously biased, but I think the App Engine team has built a great service. - Bret Taylor
@felix: EC2 isn't, and won't be, THAT user-friendly - after all, assembling stuff requires some manual work :) That's the beauty of Google AppEngine: if you want to do some webapp stuff quick and easy, go play with it. If you need something different, you'll discover that EC2+S3 is still the only game in town, though. - Cesar Cardoso
Although I know absolutely nothing about Python, I'm still pretty damn excited about the prospect of using Google's services for free to build a web app. Not sure if I am going to wait for a PHP release or if I'll learn Python before I jump in to this. Either way, it rocks! - Scott Jarkoff
@cesar: True! I think, though, that Amazon could add a prettier face in front of AWS. A nice dashboard control panel that showed you running states and various info on your instances as well as easy start/stop. Point and click grouping/load balancing, key mgmt - things of that sort could go a long ways towards making it more attractive. - felix
I also worry that AppEngine will be hobbled by GQL, without joins or 'OR' for example, the database layout seems like it won't allow for complex schemas. I'm still excited to get my AppEngine invite to play around with it - the price is definitely right. :) - felix
If you are doing any kind of heavy processing (transcoding), scientific computing appengine is a non-starter. EC2 on the other hand is ideal for stuff like that. It's more work, but that's a good thing :) - Deepak
@felix: That may be true to a certain extent, but I believe the simplified query syntax is part of what allows the datastore to scale easily. If you're willing to do some up-front work to structure your database so that you can perform the queries you need, you shouldn't ever have to worry about hitting a scalability wall. So it's kind of freeing if you look at it that way. - Joel Webber
