Google App Engine
Google has just made available a preview release of Google App Engine. Google App Engine is an application programing environment built with the same scalable technology and infrastructure that runs some of Google’s applications. App Engine is available as a Software Development Kit (SDK). Once an application is developed for App Engine, it can them be uploaded and hosted by Google. A application written for App Engine will run for free on Google’s bandwidth and computing power.
The initial preview release of Google App Engine is only available for 10,000 developer, and as of this writing their are no more available slots. At this time, App Engine applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. This configuration is expected to serve up to 5 million page views per month.
App Engine hides a lot of the mundane technical challenges a web developer worries about, such as coding, debugging, configure Apache web servers, setting up a SQL database, creating database tables, sharding the database, running scripts, pushing out new versions, monitoring performance, scaling, and version control you system. App Engine is a simple alternative to the LAMP stack. Google App Engine will facilitate and simplify web application development to the masses.
For the initial release, the App Engine Stack includes a scalable serving infrastructure, Python runtime, SDK, web-based admin console, and datastore. The Google App Engine environment is based on many of the same technologies that make Google work, such as Python, Google File System, Bigtable, Google Accounts, and Google Apps. It is also worth noting that Python is only the first language with App Engine support, expect Google to make an SDK available for other languages such as Java.
Google engineers have stated that App Engine will not make any restrictions on code, modules, and frameworks. You should be able to run any JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and Python framework. In fact, there are tutorials for running Django on App Engine.
Features that might be available in future releases of App Engine is support for large upload/downloads, support for other languages, offline processing and the availability of additional capacity for a fee.
Here are additional links, resources, and tutorials to help you get started with Google App Engine.
Google App Engine
Google Code: App Engine
Google Groups: App Engine
Google App Engine Blog
What Is Google App Engine?
Google App Engine: Getting Started
Running Django on Google App Engine
Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data
The Google File System
App Engine App Gallery
Here is a video presentation of Google AppEngine from Google Campfire One. The video has a live development demo and a lot of technical information.
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