by Asim Jalis
Check out Google App Engine.
http://code.google.com/appengine/
There is a waiting list for developer accounts so I would
recommend signing up ASAP.
Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the
same scalable systems that power Google applications. No
assembly required. Google App Engine provides a
fully-integrated application environment. It's easy to scale.
Google App Engine makes it easy to build scalable applications
that grow from one user to millions of users without
infrastructure headaches. It's free to get started. Every
Google App Engine application can use up to 500MB of persistent
storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for 5 million monthly page
views.
This might be a big breakthrough for Python:
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/whatisgoogleappengine.html
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.
Here are my initial thoughts.
1. Their data model might work better than Amazon's S3. If they
offer instantaneous updates and other semantic guarantees than
using their data back-end would be a no-brainer.
2. They use Python. This is incredible. I suspect a surge in
demand for Python developers.
3. Even though there is a waiting list for developers, the SDK is
publicly available. So it should be possible create some test
applications.
4. Django is supported.
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/gettingstarted/usingwebapp.html
Google App Engine supports any framework written in pure Python
that speaks CGI (and any WSGI-compliant framework using a CGI
adaptor), including Django, CherryPy, Pylons, and web.py. You
can bundle a framework of your choosing with your application
code by copying its code into your application directory.
5. This takes care of the hosting and deployment issues connected
with Python.
6. User accounts. The Python app can use Google user accounts. So
no need to write CAPTCHA or manage user accounts on a fragile
local database.
7. Database. The app engine provides a data model which is very
similar to the way Django works: define your classes and fields
and the engine generates all the object-to-relational mapping
code. You can also use GQL (their variation of SQL).
8. Templates. They use the Django templating engine.
9. Uploading apps. The SDK comes with a tool called appcfg.py
which uploads the app into Google.
10. The downside is that with this Google could become the next
Microsoft. They could get a kind of API lock-in. But in the
short-term it seems like a great opportunity, especially for
people into Python.
Here is the Hacker News story on this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=157443. An interesting
observation from a HN reader: "I'm surprised nobody has mentioned
this - does this mean the tech cost of a web-based startup is now
$0?"
