Into the Cloud with Google App Engine Managing information becomes more and more important for individuals and corporations that want to use the web strategically to build value - in these days it's trendy to collaborate, share data and information over the Web.

If somebody asked me what kind of Google Apps I'm using regularly, well, there is award winning Gmail, Reader, iGoogle, Blogger, Docs and of course the most important: Search. Without search no information, without information no action. Google's automated search technology enables me to obtain nearly instant access to any relevant information.

One of the latest Google innovations is Google App Engine, which lets one run Web applications on Google's infrastructure with no servers to maintain. Currently it supports the Python runtime environment using Python version 2.5.2 and provides APIs for the datastore, Google Accounts, URL fetch and email services.

Although Python is not my speciality and my time is very limited, I found it quite comfortable to step into cloud computing with no servers to maintain, to follow the examples and create a first App with Google App Engine. It's early stage, but I think this service is very promising. It's not made to host any SAP datacenter, but it's made to extend the Google experience building modern applications on top of a worldclass datacenter with reduced maintenance costs and the purpose to

• create new opportunities for self-expression and collaboration
• complement and compete in products and services
• leverage network effects and monetization

The tool-kit includes the Django web application framework with form validation, version 0.96.1 or newer, supporting Dojo as state of the art AJAX incarnation.

Latest APIs allow to do image manipulation and caching through memcached, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system to speed up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load as I noticed through several blogs.

It encourages to make use of Web-standards like OAuth for secure API authentication, JSON, a lightweight data-interchange format based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language and and OpenSocial, to create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds from Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

The rapid adoption of broadband has made it possible to move more and more applications to the Web.

• More on Google

Labels: apis, cloud, collaboration, google, networking, social

  ¶ 'Into the Cloud with Google App Engine' posted by eA : 11:53 AM  0 comments links to this post