Google App Engine

SimianLogic — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 07:07:25 +0000

Interesting news tonight: it seems as though Google is opening up their massive resource pool to the public at large (well, at least 10,000 of them). I signed up for it and got my invite an hour or so later, and I have to say it looks pretty promising. I’ve been tinkering with Heroku for a month or so now, and that also got me pretty excited. The thing about Heroku, though, is that my application sort of exists only in the cloud. They have access APIs for replicating their specific rails environment in a local setup, but the hassle of setting up that environment is frankly just not worth it. I’ve already got mySQL installed, so installing postgreSQL just for running my Heroku app locally seems a bit excessive. Both products are in beta, but there are a couple of things about Heroku that sort of bug me–namely, there’s currently no way to write your own robots.txt file, which means its practically impossible to “release” an application. If it doesn’t exist in Google’s eyes, it might as well not exist.

Though I’ve only just learned about this new Google Apps Engine, I’m going to assume it won’t have that problem. And if it scales as easily as they’re claiming it will… well I might just have to learn Python. I poked around at Django’s documenation a little bit, and it doesn’t seem so different from Rails. There are a couple of drawbacks, of course–a 500 megabyte storage limit and a one megabyte single-file limit. Sockets are also prohibited, which isn’t all that surprising (though it would be nice of Google to offer something which could be used as a multiplayer game server…).

It’ll be interesting to follow what comes out of it.

SimianLogic Studios » google app engine

Google App Engine