i like it more when there are more people, more knowledge and more cooperation involved in new technology. This means for me economical esteem.

I somehow doubt the problem with the YouTube acquisition was the transition of the backend systems. I suspect the difficulty lies more with the transition of the fact that YouTube bleeds money.

Only a total dumbfuck would put their business on App Engine.

This looks like a proprietary system in a way that nothing written on it can run anywhere else. With Amazon if I do not like what I see I can anytime move code and data from their virtual servers to my own datacenter.

Sorry Google, no deal. Free cheese is only in the mousetrap. Take your Trojan Horse and stick it up your ass.

@scalawag: goodness, you're right! I've never heard of these "Python" and "Django" things before! IT MUST BE A TRAP

@scalawag: You see, websites are like TV shows- they last for 2-5 years and then go out of fashion. It is wasteful to build up a hardware infrastructure to host a disposable (possibly junk) show- Myspace, Friendster, Facebook. After all, TV stations do not buy hardware and TV towers to specifically broadcast say Baywatch. So this is a right move for Google and Amazon, to build up this hardware so that this disposable worthless junk can just shuffle smoothly, but still run on the same servers.

Yay Python!

I don't care about this at all but the world would be a better place if we all used Python. Most PHP developers are retards and Ruby people can only program in Rails, thus Python is like the one ring of programming languages.

Finally, yet another way to separate the men from the boys in the tech sandbox. If your business model includes a Financial statement that ends with "Year 3, 100M users, $1.2B rev" then please use Google App Engine. It will save us all the headache of taking you at all seriously.

@Dweezil: W00t! A programming language war! We'll turn this into Slashdot yet.
Emacs rocks!
vi sucks!

@jacksonwest: Oracle powers SimpleDB? I have been following SimpleDB pretty closely, and I would be very, very surprised at that. Have any links with more detail on that?

@SFJoe: Programmers with a background in Python write clean code. I'm not a computer science graduate or a programmer (primarily because I value my sanity and I never got past integrating derivatives), but anyone I've ever seen who has Python on their resume writes C++/Fortran/VBA/Java/matlab/Perl better than those without, and will probably write Fortress well, which I suspect will end up being a requirement for a lot of quant jobs in the coming years.

@matto: Dude, it is not just Python limitation, their whole environment is proprietary. If you cannot move your data into a real relational DB off-cloud (like MySQL instance sitting in colo) your business is at their mercy.

@plushmessiah: You are right about TV show comparison, but it would be very strange if a cable network had power to prevent you from taking your content elsewhere. Amazon lets you do it, Google tries to lock you in.

Amazon rocks, Google sucks.

You can't do anything _but_ python-over-persistent-storage with this. What if I need to do background processing?

A startup with the technical needs beyond that of Twitter is going to have a hard time finding Google App Engine useful.

@Ted Dziuba: I think App Engine would even FAIL for Twitter. ROTFLMAO!

@scalawag: dude, kill yourself. seriously.

@Ted Dziuba: rotlfmaolol rofl @}-,-`- bion cyal8r

hth

eot

@Ted Dziuba: Ted Dziuba is a very cool guy. He Persai's a lot and does not afraid of anything. I am totally serial.

Um, no, to the article and the rest of you.

The documentation makes it clear that the plan is to make the entry level system free beyond the temporary limitation of 10,000 developers.

Amazon sells books (and stuff) and is diversifying, bless them for that, and Oracle powers zillions of applications that won't be convertable to this for almost that many years.

Who this threatens is Rackspace and the like who start raking in the dough from small companies and start-ups who haven't even invested in a cabinet for their letterhead stationary yet.

During the previous cycle in the 90s every Avon sales-lady could have her own personal business page with the help of Geocities and all the follow-ons. Problem with all the free stuff was that it was just static pages, maybe augmented by a free forum or something.

Now the sky is the limit as far as your concept goes. You could re-invent Facebook (God forbid) with this without laying out a dime for servers and the only time you have to start paying is when you have enough traffic to actually test your monetization scheme (if you are cluefull enough to have one).

Yes, it's true that this will make cherry-picking the good apps easier for Google, but nothing is stopping several other companies from doing a similar deal. Bigtable, which is Google's super-scaleable stand-in for SQL (and looks similar to it from a programming point of view) is already being cloned in Open Source. Microsoft and Amazon have their own clones already. You could write cover functions to mask the differences if you wanted to be portable, and as mentioned above the other components are all already Open Source. They'll support other languages than Python RSN (Real Soon Now).

The immediate "victims", as I said, are Rackspace and the like, although I don't expect them to close up shop any time soon.

If we are lucky though the thousands of other fly-by-night (mostly middle-men) hosting providers (who often sub-let from Rackspace) will find that old door to door Amway business that they put on the shelf once again an easier row to hoe.

This is getting a lot of amateurs out of the business of running (or pretending to run) data centers.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

@Dweezil: So what you are saying is that you are in no way qualified to to judge what a good programming language is nor what makes a good programmer.

@dalejo: Most computer scientists and programmers themselves aren't qualified to do either of those things. What I'm saying is that Python does not have the quirky bullshit that PHP does, and the Ruby community is inherently circle-jerky so I allow myself blind dislike of the language (I'll be more interested when it has more than one framework).

If the first language someone learns and take to an advanced level is Java, Perl or PHP I immediately assume there is going to be a problem. If I deal with programmers it means that there is a situation where something they built has failed and is, as a result, hemorrhaging money--or it is antiquated and cannot be easily interpreted by new programmers/consultants who are complaining to me and is, as a result, hemorrhaging money. People who write Python, in my experience, write cleaner code that I can understand (no small feat), and as a result they get a leg-up in the hiring process. I'd like to see Python become the standard for beginning computer scientists (that or Scheme), not Java, because it produces better programmers.

@dweezil My god ... where you always this clueless or did you fall off a skateboard at sometime in your life. WTF are you talking about python coders write better code than php coders? Which ones? Ruby coders are circle-jerky, people from NY are smarter than ones from NJ. You are an idiot!

As for CS101 languages ... man up dude .. before you speak of what u do not know... see alice

Best regards...

Also, Oracle runs SimpleDB? Yikes ...

@Dweezil: I think you might be in a bit of a circle-jerky community. There is a lot more development done outside of PHP, python and RoR. As much as I hate java, it's the only "real" development language you mention. There is a big difference between a developer and a scripter, I think you are dealing a lot with the latter.

@zabovo: Listen, Crazy Blog Guy Who Does Nothing And Pretends To Know Something About Computers, this is a constant experience for me. Python has nothing to do with any development the company I work for does, and yet I have consistently found that people who started in Python write the cleanest code. Maybe there's some other factor, maybe they just happen to be the best people I interview, I don't really care--it's a plus for them to have it as a background. It is completely anecdotal evidence, and anecdotal evidence is all I care about because I am not in an industry where I can sit around and write shitty blog posts all day.

We can, however, sit around and comment on blogs all day. 1/2 ain't bad.

@dalejo: I guess that's debatable, but to be fair all I've dealt with hiring-wise over the last 2 years is ATS work and the random DBA. There's no way Java is the best possible first programming language for someone to learn, though.

@Dweezil
Most major universities disagree. Java is widely taught in first year. It's excellent for introducing people to objected-oriented-programming.

Dalejo wins this arguement for being much more entertaining.

@smncameron: Most major universities also don't have a dedicated software engineering program, and force people who want to learn how to program to deal with hardware shit and mountains of theory. [www.joelonsoftware.com] Java is an awful first language to learn, a VHLL should be the first language any programmer learns, unless he wants to struggle through C, or else all his time will be spent on unlearning bad habits. It's a common second language to learn to teach oo principles, but all it should be is an introduction.

i agree with scalawag. this thing smells fishy. it will be somewhat proprietary. Google wants to control the universe -- and that's why it has to keep reminding itself - do no evil.

i disagree with Dweezil. Python is slow. A lot of web applications developed in Python are sloooow. Witness Plone, Zope, etc. Even Google Apps is not fast. Compare it to Facebook or MediaWiki (both written by the 'retard' language PHP) and you will know the difference. Python sucks. Php, while it definitely isn't a 'clean' language, rocks. Of course, C/C++ is the fastest. Python is slooooow.

Lastly I wonder which self-respecting programmer would want to work under these constraints (unless Google opens up more):

(from Google Apps FAQ)
A small percentage of native C python modules, and subsets of native C python modules are not available with Google App Engine. A full list detailing native C Python module support can be found here. The disabled modules fall in to the following categories:

* Libraries that maintain databases on disk are not enabled in Python for Google App Engine
* Sockets are disabled with Google App Engine
* The system does not allow you to invoke subprocesses, as a result some os module methods are disabled
* Threading is not available
*
* For security reasons, most C-based modules are disabled
* Other features that are limited:
o marshal is disabled
o cPickle is aliased to pickle
o System calls have been disabled

Please keep in mind that third party packages which use any of the above features will not function with Google App Engine (packages such as mysql, postgresql, etc).