10gen: Cloud hosting platform offering serverside Javascript

There was some speculation that Google will offer it once they open up the App Engine Platform to more languages, there were some small-scale attempts with serverside Javascript (including the mine, with http://erlyjs.googlecode.com, which is currently receiving very little attention from my side) but now 10gen (with well known Java hacker and director of the Apache Software Foundation Geir Magnusson as CoFounder) plans to offer cloud-based hosting solution with any language running on the Java VM (at least that is what I am reading between the lines of their press release) and the funny thing is they don't start with Java itself, no they offer as first Language Javascript. The guys at 10gen also seem to like django, a quick look at one of the tutorials reveals they are providing a thing called djang10, django inspired framework for creating web applications purely in Javascript.

It's getting cloudy - Yahoo Application Platform

Just read this on TechCrunch:

... Yahoo Application Platform (YAP) - which will be a direct competitor to Google App Engine. Users can host their independent applications on Yahoo’s bandwidth, storage, database and CPU resources. At first they’ll support SecurePHP applications only, but they’ll expand to additional languages over time. The model will be very similar to Google’s - free usage up to a point, metered after that. They’ll also offer various developer tools as well.

With Yahoo offering cloud based PHP app hosting, I hope Google will focus on soon adding the already announced really useful features to App Engine, and not waste engineering efforts for supporting PHP.

Google App Engine Team fixing issues quickly

Toying around a bit today on Google App Engine, I found a minor issue (not security related, very easy to work around and only affecting Mac users) in an add-on for the actual SDK. Only 32 minutes after I reported the issue they had fixed it !

Scaling down - the least talked about feature of GAE

It launched less than a week ago and now all over the blogosphere people are discussing the Google App Engine (GAE). Most talk is about scaling up, about potential lock-ins, even if the SDK is based on open source software. Only one thing where developers seem generally to agree: with Python, Google has made a good choice (maybe those not knowing Python yet but desperately looking forward to learn it, don't know that Python dictates line indention, actually the only thing I had difficulty to get used to). That is interesting by itself, because developers usually are highly opinionated in regard to programming languages. Or is it just the early adapter mentality which is more flexible ? Anyway - in this article I want to talk about something I haven't found mentioned yet at 100 other places:

scaling down

I see a growing number of businesses reducing or eliminating their IT department by using Google Apps (gmail & Co. on custom domain) for e-mail and other standard tasks covered by the Google Apps suite. Custom built applications for streamlining their non-standard, probably also simple but business specific work-flow has been beyond the budget of small organizations. So they used the available standard tools, which are often more complex than necessary for those tasks. But now the creation and especially the maintenance of custom built web applications is getting cheaper with GAE, because problems like authentication, deployment, high availability and even data redundancy (as probably-good-enough backup-strategy) are solved already and the cost for hosting gets completely eliminated (scaling down means just few concurrent users per application, little resource usage and the app will probably stay within the quotas for free usage of GAE). So the saved money from traditional in-house or outsourced IT administration, spent on development of custom applications will allow organization to improve their efficiency. And Google of course still will make good money with this scenario, because some companies will choose Google Apps Premier Edition over free/limited edition and will pay Google 50 $ per user account / per year.

Google App Engine - Niall Kennedy's summary

Great summary about the Google App engine, by Niall Kennedy. He even provides some insights about the people behind it, and according to his first hand knowledge, this is just the beginning of what Google is rolling out:

I met with the App Engine's team leads on Monday morning for an in-depth overview of the product, its features, and its limitations. Google has been working on the Google App Engine since at least March 2006 and has only just begun revealing some of its features.