Google App Engine
04/08/2008
By Trevor Baca, VP Software Engineering


If you haven't already heard, click over to Google's announcement of the new app engine development and runtime environment.

Summary: write a web app and deploy to Google's massive array of servers. APIs exist for user authentication, data storage, mail, URL fetching, etc. 500MB of storage and CPU bandwidth for 5 million pageviews a month. Only free accounts at the moment with the possibility to buy more computing or storage resource coming in future.

The interesting part? Google app engine is 100% python. (For now, anyway.) The web framework is Django (which is to python what Rails is to ruby). And you have to write all application code in python (as opposed to PHP or ruby).

Oh, and Google announced the app engine last night with 10,000 accounts available. Which are now all taken. Every last one.

It makes sense. Guido van Rossum, python's inventor, now works at Google. And python is widely reported as the single most important language in the Google's running and management of its network and absolutely enormous arrays of servers.

We're just now finishing up a three-year migration of the most important parts of the Jaduka and NetworkIP codebases from C to python. The migration has been challenging -- all migrations are -- but extremely beneficial. We're realized a 10-to-1 compression of lines of code, far more flexible database access, and -- most importantly of all -- dramatically faster implementation of every realtime telephony service we've put our hands on since then.

But full disclosure -- our use (and love) of python extends only to our core realtime systems code. We manage a complex network of telephony switches, routers, and application-, database- and statistical process control-servers all in python. But our web applications?

They're all in PHP.

It takes an array of languages to make the world go 'round. And we're excited about the announcement of Google's new app engine. Check it out.