What You’re Doing Is Rather Desperate

ResolveRef, a RESTful way to resolve PubMed queries by journal, year, volume and page is Andrew’s port of OpenRef to App Engine. Simple, but very effective and a nice illustration of how to get to grips with the App Engine environment.

Keep those “App Engine apps for researchers” rolling in, folks.

…with a biologically-relevant application for Google App Engine, is Euan with pycite, a port of Connotea. Man, this makes me want to learn Python fast.

More thoughts and commentary at Deepak’s blog.

Been 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.