Google Opens up gCloud, Watch out, RoR, EC2 and Flex
Google announced Google App Engine and WOW-ed the the whole web. And, this is just a preview release! What this has anything to do with RIA? Keep reading.
Here are the quick points you’d expect from Google App Engine:
- It’s a virtual hosting environment in the “gCloud”.
- Your gAppEngine apps run off appspot.com domain or from your Google Apps. Now Google Apps has totally new meaning.
- Account is free with 500MB storage (including DB)
- The CPU and bandwidth can support 5 million page views a month. Good enough.
- Free in preview release, will have charge model in the future. Not a surprise.
- Programming language is Python 2.5.2.
- Programming model is CGI based.
- Datastore is not RDBMS, more like SimpleDB from Amazon EC2. GQL is the language used to access the data.
- SDK contains simulate environment, in Python of cause.
- SDK contains the Python standard library.
- SDK contains web framework webapp and Django v0.96.
- All configuration is done via YAML file. Familiar, um?
- During the preview release, each developer can only have 3 applications deployed.
For the rest of details, head to Google Code and knock yourself off.
Impact? First of all, Amazon Web Service (EC2, S2, etc.) should be scared, really scared. The scale of the Google Cloud and cloud of Google power can easily turn the bookstore morphed EC2 up-side-down. The true power of gCloud will from the integration of all the Google services and Google applications, online or offline. I believe a new web computing platform race is just started. Just wait for Microsoft and Yahoo to come up with their own “me too”. Not sure how Amazon will response though. Amazon does has lead time and sound business model in place. They might get creative and survive well.
Next, Ruby On Rail. Obviously, the Python community can celebrate big time about this. All of sudden, Python is mainstream scripting language now. I won’t be surprise that O’Reilly will report big jump on Python book sales. Hack, I will go buy couple of them too. One winner is Django, the so called Rails on Python (or Python on Rails). Time to check it out.
In RIA space? How about DjangoAMF, the a middleware for Django web framework written in Python. It enables Flash/Flex applications to invoke Django’s view functions using AMF(Action Message Format). See, I just give you a Flex RIA solution running on Google App Engine using the supported framework. Can’t wait to give it a try.
It’s also about time to revisit Ted Patrick’s post, Python and ActionScript.
This post by Bruce Eckel is refreshing too, Put a Flex UI on Your Application, it’s about Combine the power of Python with the polish of Flash to create a desktop application. This approach will also work with any language that has support for creating an XML-RPC server (Java, Ruby, C++, to name a few). Also, The XML-RPC server can easily be on another machine.
Leave a Comment
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
Recent Posts
Categories
Visitors
Give Python a couple of months and it’s going to be Rails on GAE afterwards. Just a hunch.
And that means startups like Morph eXchange are pushed to provide more value even more or risk getting trampled on.
Best.
alain