Almost a year after they became available eWEEK Labs took a look at software built on Google's App Engine to see what applications have been built on the technology. While none have yet reached the size and power of Facebook or Twitter, there are some interesting apps out there. It might trail others, such as Amazon Web Services, but Google App Engine shows promise as a viable platform for large Web-based applications.When I first became aware of
Google App Engine, I was skeptical. It seemed to have some severe shortcomings that would make it unable to match up to competitors, especially
Amazon Web Services.
These perceived shortcomings included the fact that your Google applications do not have access to an entire virtual server setup in the way that, for example, Amazon.com's
Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) does. On EC2, applications get an
entire virtual private server, complete with an entire operating system
of your choice (including Linux, Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and even
Sun Microsystems' Solaris). The applications can then be written and
compiled in any language supported by your chosen operating system, and
run on the virtual server.
Google App Engine,
on the other hand, limits you to a tightly controlled Python virtual
machine. Your applications can only be written in Python, and you don't
have access to a file system or any of the operating system features.
And Python isn't a truly compiled language.
Click here to see some of the sites built on the Google App Engine.
Furthermore, unlike competitors' offerings, your Google applications
don't have access to a full SQL-based database. Instead, if you want to
use a database, you must use the Google Datastore.
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