Expand your sphere with a piece of Google

Unlimited Worlds

Article from ADMIN 04/2011

By Tim Schürmann

Web developers dream of getting their hands on the collective power of Google's servers. Google App Engine offers a free corner of the Google universe.

Amazon started converting its excess computational power to cash some time ago. Under such names as EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud), S3 (Simple Storage Service), and SimpleDB, the book and coffee machine mail order company has had considerable success leasing virtual machines, disk space, and distributed database services to users.

Introducing App Engine

Google's release of App Engine brought another web hosting giant to this emerging market. The search engine host can easily spare the necessary power; Google's giant data centers are unlikely to be fazed by just another web application. But Google was not satisfied with providing simple disk space – it added a chic interior as well. Garnished with a couple of buzzwords, the results of this project were ready for the general public in May 2008. Three years later, it's still in a beta phase, but it's nevertheless quite stable and usable.

The product designation, Google App Engine, covers a number of services. To begin with, anybody who registers for a free user account with Google is given some free disk space on Google's servers, a database, and the ability to launch their own web application.

At first, App Engine only supported Python. (Incidentally, Python's creator, Guido van Rossum, hired by Google in 2005, was responsible for the corresponding App Engine environment.) Users got to choose the next programming language to be supported by the App Engine themselves [1]. Most voters opted for a Java environment, which was finally completed by Google in April 2009. The third language will be Go [2]. At the time of writing this, the support for Go is still marked as experimental.

In all three languages, a couple of interesting libraries are available by default. In Python, for example, the popular Django framework

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