Last week Google released a very interesting hosting environment for web developers, Google App Engine. It's a quick and easy way to deploy and host your web app on Google's infrastructure. It's Python only for the time being but that will change soon enough.

About Google App Engine:

Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google's infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain. You just upload your application, and it's ready to serve your users.


You can serve your app using a free domain name on the appspot.com domain, or use Google Apps to serve it from your own domain. You can share your application with the world, or limit access to members of your organization.

I caught up with Dion Almaer from Google at the London OnAIR event and had quit chat with about what App Engine is all about.

Read more thoughts from Dion on the App Engine over at Ajaxian.

In some ways it seems like EC2 and S3 from Amazon, but it's not that similar basically App Engine does a lot more for you while imposing some constraints so that you do things the "Google Way". The Amazon stack is more flexible and gives you lower level access; but you have to do more work.

Here's what the team at Google says you can expect next:

* Support for more languages. We're obviously huge Python fans, but we recognize that there are other great languages out there that developers use to build web applications.
* Support for offline processing. Right now Google App Engine is great for web apps that do all of their processing in response to user requests, but what about apps that need to perform scheduled tasks or larger-scale data migration? We'd like to support those apps too.
* Support for large files. Google App Engine currently imposes a limit of 1MB on all requests, both inbound and outbound. We're interested in providing efficient support for much larger uploads and downloads.
* Billing for additional quota. During the preview release period, all apps are restricted to a set of free resource quotas. Although Google App Engine will always be free to get started, we plan on allowing developers to purchase additional resources in the future, while paying only for what they use.

Michael Mahemoff brings up some interesting points on how this may influence the spread of JavaScript to the server. Very interesting development indeed.

Adoption seems to be pretty quick, Mike Chambers wrote a code formatting service while on the tour. Also, I just noticed on Ajaxian this morning that Appcelerator has released an app that uses Flex to do a carousel type UI for song browsing deployed on AppEngine. Check it out here. I wonder how long before more RIA frameworks, Ajax or other, are integrated with App Engine?

I'd love to hear from developers working with it, drop me an email or leave a comment.

Read more from Andre Charland.