Martin's blog^2.0

A couple of days ago Google launched something called Google App Engine. In a nutshell it gives you the ability to develop applications using their infrastructure. For me, this is one of the most important announcements that Google made over the last time and even when it doesn't compete directly with Amazon's service it could become a competitor in some segments (mainly typical python web applications). I have some different thoughts about this launch and I think it has it pros and cons:

• Pros:
  • It gives you the ability to program in a web environment with a very powerful OOP language as python.
  • It takes away the problem of clustering your application.
  • You can publish your application in their catalog.
  • The BigTable interface proved for them to be a good alternative to relational databases.
  • You will have plenty of examples from other developers using this framework
  • It provides some very usefull services as mail, storage, user management and url fetch to comunicate to other hosts
  • It comes with a local SDK environment to use it in your local computer
• Cons:
  • You can't know what the cost of the service could be.
  • You can't get an account right now because they opened only 10.000 accounts and they are all taken (It reminds me to gmail early days)
  • The storage seems very little (only 500 Mb) for some kind of applications.
  • I don't know if this is the case but Google always builds it's own standard instead of using some widely used (GData Vs. Atom)
  • The Data API doesn't seems too nice (not better than elixir in Python or Active Record in Ruby)
  • Google has a secret plan to take over the world and this is a big step (controlling every application) :P