Google’s appengine
April 8, 2008 — nsaundersBeen following the Google appengine release via FriendFeed and Twitter (with thanks to @mndoci, @rvidal). A few resources:
- O’Reilly Radar writeup - explains what it’s all about
- Article at SmoothSpan Blog
- Technorati search - slowly picking up
- FriendFeed public stream discussions
- Update: official Google blog announcement
- Update: Deepak’s thoughts
In brief: appengine provides infrastructure for developers to host web applications using the same tools that Google uses (notably GFS and a scalable data store termed BigTable). What’s more - there is a free service and anyone with a Google account can sign up for the beta test. Any downsides? It’s Python-only for now, but that’s expected to change.
This is exciting news. I would really like to see some bioinformatics developers try it out and report back with their experiences.


April 8, 2008 at 4:23 pm
[...] Further reading: Google Blog App Engine blog Neil [...]
April 8, 2008 at 5:15 pm
Yippee !! I got a slot in the beta !!
Reading over the SDK docs, Appengine looks quite nice so far. It’s nothing like Amazons EC2+S3 (which is mostly amounts to pay-by-the-hour VPS hosting) and much more like a real webapp platform … it’s a bit like Ning, but more comprehensible to me (probably because Appengine uses Python, while Ning uses PHP).
Now I guess I’d better start writing an app … I might try porting over one of my half finished Turbogears projects …
April 9, 2008 at 1:47 am
[...] http://nsaunders.wordpress.com/2008/04/08/googles-appengine/ [...]
April 9, 2008 at 1:49 am
too slow!
in getting an acct that is .. hahah great to see this.. I jus wonder when someone will use appenging for a scientific tool and get published as well…
April 23, 2008 at 10:32 am
[...] two weeks ago, tipped off by Neil, I heard about Google App Engine. I managed to get a beta account, and I’ve finally had a [...]
April 23, 2008 at 10:41 am
As “promised” … a port of one of my Turbogears apps ResolveRef. It was mostly fiddling with JQuery fancy-shmancy web2.0 stuff that slowed me down. If I knew it was a race I would have put more time into it to try and beat pycite out the gate :).