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Simon Willison’s Weblog

Google App Engine. Write applications in Python using a WSGI compatible application framework, then host them on Google’s highly scalable infrastructure. The most exciting part is probably the Datastore API, which provides external developers with access to Bigtable for the first time.

Posted 8th April 2008 at 7:25 am

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11 comments

  1. Holy shit.

    Ryan Tomayko - 8th April 2008 07:54 - #

  2. "Holy shit" just about sums it up nicely.

    Peter Sabaini - 8th April 2008 08:48 - #

  3. I'm torn because on one hand I think this is very cool but on the other we're giving Google (arguably the next Microsoft) both our code and our data and trusting them with it. I guess for some it would work but I would be very leary to trust Google to do no evil.

    I like that's it's Django yet looking through the API it's really not very Django like except for the templates. It will be interesting to see what people do with it none the less. At the very least, it's bulk media hosting for free and a good platform for experimentation.

    Jeff Triplett - 8th April 2008 08:53 - #

  4. John Gruber summed it up better then I did by pointing out that one of Google's App Engine example apps is a feature-for-feature clone of 37 Signal's Campfire. Even down to the design and layout details.

    "Borrowing ideas is fair game, but copying an entire app is wrong. And it's creepy, in a Microsoft-of-the-'90s way, when it's a $150 billion company cloning an app from a 10-person company."

    http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/april#tue-08 -huddlechat

    Jeff Triplett - 8th April 2008 09:09 - #

  5. @Jeff Triplett: I don't know about it being not very Django-like: in addition to templates, they ported newforms to work with the BigTable backend, and the datastore API was inspired by the Django ORM. And you can run the full Django stack without modification.

    Paul Smith - 8th April 2008 10:32 - #

  6. Google App Engine and Django both have the ability to use the WSGI standard to run applications. As a result, it is possible to use nearly the entire Django stack on Google App Engine, including middleware. As a developer, the only necessary adjustment is modifying your Django data models to make use of the Google App Engine Datastore API to interface with the fast, scalable Google App Engine datastore. Since both Django and Google App Engine have a similar concept of models, as a Django developer, you can quickly adjust your application to use our datastore.

    More here

    Denis Hovart - 8th April 2008 10:51 - #

  7. Ok, I think I'll read the whole comments before posting next time.

    Denis Hovart - 8th April 2008 10:55 - #

  8. Google might enter into full webhosting service and there will surely be mass layoffs in the webhosting industry.

    Web - 8th April 2008 14:11 - #

  9. I'm with Ryan and Peter. "Holy shit" covers it!

    Mara - 8th April 2008 14:15 - #

  10. The main thing at the moment seems to be that the sessions framework is not yet supported, though I don't think it will be long before we see a port of it to use the BigTable API.

    Siddharta Govindaraj - 9th April 2008 07:30 - #

  11. Well, I guess this is a big thing. Perhaps I'll just get to use OpenId thanks to this nifty app I found out about:
    http://openid-provider.appspot.com/

    Adam Hepner - 22nd April 2008 18:09 - #

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