At the start of this week the big G had a community preview release of Google App Engine, a platform for delivering scalable web applications. Basically the gist of the system is to hand all of your code to Google, who will run it for you on their servers. You get all the advantages of the Google infrastructure that exist within the GooglePlex, for free! So that means free hosting, free database server (running BigTable) and free access to Google accounts API, and Google checkout, allowing you to plugin these modules quickly and easily into your app. The announcement was followed closely by some bad feeling in the blogosphere kicking off, some people feeling that the chat app demoed was a bit too close to Basecamp’s design etc. And the subsequently took it offline. More here on that. Anyway that’s neither here nor there, the below video should give an overview of their recent thinking.
Google campfire is Google’s reachout to the developer community, allowing them to build on feedback received directly. This announcement has definitely got me thinking that its never been a better time to start picking up some more open source related skills, i.e. PHP or Python. Python seems to be a majorly important language within the ‘plex, and this announcement furthers the importance they place on it as a seriously language. The first release of App Engine only supports Python at present. Coming from a MS developer camp, I can’t ever seeing them open something like this up to Microsoft Technology, and at this moment in time I personally have too many eggs in MS’s basket. Might be time to grab a few books on Python / PHP me thinks.
