Google App Engine

[Duncan Booth]

Google have announced a new service called 'Google App Engine' which may
be of interest to some of the people here (although if you want to sign
up you'll have to join the queue behind me):

From the introduction:

What Is Google App Engine?

Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google's
infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to
maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs
grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just
upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users.

You can serve your app using a free domain name on the appspot.com
domain, or use Google Apps to serve it from your own domain. You can
share your application with the world, or limit access to members of
your organization.

App Engine costs nothing to get started. Sign up for a free account,
and you can develop and publish your application for the world to see,
at no charge and with no obligation. A free account can use up to
500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5
million page views a month.

During the preview release of Google App Engine, only free accounts
are available. In the near future, you will be able to purchase
additional computing resources. The Application Environment

Google App Engine makes it easy to build an application that runs
reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data. The
environment includes the following features:

* dynamic web serving, with full support for common web
technologies
* persistent storage with queries, sorting and transactions
* automatic scaling and load balancing
* APIs for authenticating users and sending email using Google
Accounts
* a fully featured local development environment that
simulates Google App Engine on your computer

Google App Engine applications are implemented using the Python
programming language. The runtime environment includes the full Python
language and most of the Python standard library.

Although Python is currently the only language supported by Google App
Engine, we look forward to supporting more languages in the future.

http://code.google.com/appengine

[Henry Chang]

This is very interesting. Thanks for sharing!

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 1:55 AM, Duncan Booth
<du**********@invalid.invalidwrote:

Google have announced a new service called 'Google App Engine' which may
be of interest to some of the people here (although if you want to sign
up you'll have to join the queue behind me):

>From the introduction:

What Is Google App Engine?
>
Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google's
infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to
maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs
grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just
upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users.
>
You can serve your app using a free domain name on the appspot.com
domain, or use Google Apps to serve it from your own domain. You can
share your application with the world, or limit access to members of
your organization.
>
App Engine costs nothing to get started. Sign up for a free account,
and you can develop and publish your application for the world to see,
at no charge and with no obligation. A free account can use up to
500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5
million page views a month.
>
During the preview release of Google App Engine, only free accounts
are available. In the near future, you will be able to purchase
additional computing resources. The Application Environment
>
Google App Engine makes it easy to build an application that runs
reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data. The
environment includes the following features:
>
* dynamic web serving, with full support for common web
technologies
* persistent storage with queries, sorting and transactions
* automatic scaling and load balancing
* APIs for authenticating users and sending email using Google
Accounts
* a fully featured local development environment that
simulates Google App Engine on your computer
>
Google App Engine applications are implemented using the Python
programming language. The runtime environment includes the full Python
language and most of the Python standard library.
>
Although Python is currently the only language supported by Google App
Engine, we look forward to supporting more languages in the future.

http://code.google.com/appengine
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list

[William Dode]

On 08-04-2008, Duncan Booth wrote:

Google have announced a new service called 'Google App Engine' which may
be of interest to some of the people here (although if you want to sign
up you'll have to join the queue behind me):

From the introduction:

>What Is Google App Engine?

....

It's also interesting to see that we can find django, webob and pyyaml
in their sdk (license apache 2)

--
William Dodé - http://flibuste.net
Informaticien indépendant

[Berco Beute]

It's wonderful news for Python. It will definitely be a boost for
Python's (and Django's) popularity. Python finally seems to be on
every developers mind at the moment. Looks like it's showtime for
Python!

[Duncan Booth]

William Dode <wi**@flibuste.netwrote:

On 08-04-2008, Duncan Booth wrote:

>Google have announced a new service called 'Google App Engine' which
may be of interest to some of the people here (although if you want
to sign up you'll have to join the queue behind me):

From the introduction:

>>What Is Google App Engine?

...

It's also interesting to see that we can find django, webob and pyyaml
in their sdk (license apache 2)

Yes, it says you can use almost any Python web framework but django is the
preferred one.

Some of the comments at
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/07...le-app-engine/
sound kind of upset, e.g.: "Python will be a deal breaker for many…"
or "Python only. What a weird decision. Not business and community-friendly at all."

[Steve Holden]

Duncan Booth wrote:
[...]

Yes, it says you can use almost any Python web framework but django is the
preferred one.

Some of the comments at
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/07...le-app-engine/
sound kind of upset, e.g.: "Python will be a deal breaker for many…"
or "Python only. What a weird decision. Not business and community-friendly at all."

Right, but that's people for you. If you watch the announcement video
Guido specifically says that other languages will be supported and
Python is merely the first. That decision wasn't Guido's, either.

But people will always prefer complaining on the grounds of insufficient
information to keeping quiet on the basis of knowledge.

regards
Steve
--
Steve Holden [phone] [phone]
Holden Web LLC http://www.holdenweb.com/

[John Nagle]

Duncan Booth wrote:

Google have announced a new service called 'Google App Engine' which may
be of interest to some of the people here

OK, now we need a compatibility layer so you can move apps from
Google App Engine to your own servers. You don't want to be locked
into a single vendor solution, especially when they reserve the right
to start charging.

Their data store uses a subset of SQL, so it's probably possible
to write a conversion layer allowing use of MySQL.

John Nagle

[Trent Nelson]

But people will always prefer complaining on the grounds of
insufficient information to keeping quiet on the basis of knowledge.

+1 QOTW!

[Paddy]

On Apr 8, 7:51 pm, Berco Beute <[e-mail]:

It's wonderful news for Python. It will definitely be a boost for
Python's (and Django's) popularity. Python finally seems to be on
every developers mind at the moment. Looks like it's showtime for
Python!

I'm waiting for the rush of new users to c.l.p :-)
If it comes, then aren't regularly posted FAQ's newbie friendly?
Is their a good FAQ already around that we can regularly point newbies
to?

What else could we do to make c.l.p. of more use to the newbie whp may
also be new to usenet whilst keeping c.l.p a usefull place for all?

- Paddy.

[Berco Beute]

On Apr 9, 7:54 am, Paddy <[e-mail]:

What else could we do to make c.l.p. of more use to the newbie whp may
also be new to usenet whilst keeping c.l.p a usefull place for all?

- Paddy.

Maybe create a usenet/google group for newbies? A place to ask
beginners questions. And post a sticky to c.l.p. redirecting newbies
(or experienced pythoneers with newbie questions :).

2B

[Duncan Booth]

Berco Beute <cy*****@gmail.comwrote:

On Apr 9, 7:54 am, Paddy <[e-mail]:

>What else could we do to make c.l.p. of more use to the newbie whp may
also be new to usenet whilst keeping c.l.p a usefull place for all?

- Paddy.

Maybe create a usenet/google group for newbies? A place to ask
beginners questions. And post a sticky to c.l.p. redirecting newbies
(or experienced pythoneers with newbie questions :).

Or just redirect them to the already existing list
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
What do you mean by 'post a sticky'? That sounds like a web forum thing.

[Duncan Booth]

Duncan Booth <du**********@invalid.invalidwrote:

If you use authentication then again you are tied to Google accounts (or
Google Apps accounts). For a public application that would also block
attempts to move to another platform.

Correcting myself: according to
http://code.google.com/p/googleappen...s/detail?id=17 is is possible
to use OpenID, it just isn't there by default.

[Erich]

On Apr 9, 3:51 am, Duncan Booth <[e-mail]:
<snip>

The backend data store, while it has a vaguely SQLish query language is an
object database not a relational database, i.e. more like ZODB than MySQL.
It uses similar concepts to django's data api but isn't the same. It should
be possible to write something simple to replace it, but given that you
only need to migrate away from Google when your data or page hits get
large, you need to replace it with something scalable.

I have a bet with a coworker that someone will implement the api, in a
way that makes migration away from Google easy, within a month.
(actually, the bet is just that there will be a project with this
goal). The reason I mention it here, is that he had the same comments
as you regarding this. My thinking is that (if past experiences can be
used as a yardstick) the python community will see this deficiency and
work to correct it. As a result of that thinking, I am fairly certain
that this concern is not a big concern. The authentication thing,
thats a bit different.

[Daniel Fetchinson]

<snip>

The backend data store, while it has a vaguely SQLish query language is an
object database not a relational database, i.e. more like ZODB than MySQL.
It uses similar concepts to django's data api but isn't the same. It

should

be possible to write something simple to replace it, but given that you
only need to migrate away from Google when your data or page hits get
large, you need to replace it with something scalable.

I have a bet with a coworker that someone will implement the api, in a
way that makes migration away from Google easy, within a month.
(actually, the bet is just that there will be a project with this
goal). The reason I mention it here, is that he had the same comments
as you regarding this. My thinking is that (if past experiences can be
used as a yardstick) the python community will see this deficiency and
work to correct it. As a result of that thinking, I am fairly certain
that this concern is not a big concern. The authentication thing,
thats a bit different.

The best would be if the google datastore backend would be available
from sqlalchemy or sqlobject. I understand that the google datastore
is not a relational database but that just means that the full power
of sqlalchemy or sqlobject would not be available for this backend
only a limited subset. I think this should be doable especially
because GQL is very similar to SQL looks like it's really a proper
subset.

[Joshua Kugler]

Paddy wrote:

I'm waiting for the rush of new users to c.l.p :-)
If it comes, then aren't regularly posted FAQ's newbie friendly?

No, it just means they didn't take the time to read the docs and the FAQ for
themselves. :)

Is their a good FAQ already around that we can regularly point newbies
to?

You mean this one: http://www.python.org/doc/faq/

j

[Joshua Kugler]

Duncan Booth wrote:

>

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/07...le-app-engine/

"Python only. What a weird decision. Not business and
community-friendly at all."

Translation: "Not
over-engineered-top-heavy-overly-complex-job-security-inducing-Java-enterprise
friendly."

j

[Berco Beute]

On Apr 9, 12:24 pm, Duncan Booth <[e-mail]:

Berco Beute <[e-mail]:

On Apr 9, 7:54 am, Paddy <[e-mail]:

What else could we do to make c.l.p. of more use to the newbie whp may
also be new to usenet whilst keeping c.l.p a usefull place for all?

- Paddy.

Maybe create a usenet/google group for newbies? A place to ask
beginners questions. And post a sticky to c.l.p. redirecting newbies
(or experienced pythoneers with newbie questions :).

Or just redirect them to the already existing listhttp://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor

I didn't know about that list. It would be nice to have that list
duplicated as a usenet/google group (just like c.l.p).

What do you mean by 'post a sticky'? That sounds like a web forum thing.

It is. Using Google Groups some can post a post that stays on top. Not
sure if everybody would like that. :)

2B