appengine - more thoughts

Posted by Ian Holsman Fri, 11 Apr 2008 03:57:00 GMT

so i had some more time to thing about appengine, and the biggest problem I can see is the lock-in. all the other things are minor


Krow weighs in about people’s complaining about lock-in. Initially I thought so too, as there is no equivalent to GQL. but then I remember about hbase and hypertable. Once some open source guy writes a GQL clone the platform is open and I see multiple hosting providers offering it as an alternative. personally I think the lack of joins a bonus. it prevents web developers from writing slow apps ;-)

 

the lack of language support is temporary.. I mean how hard would it be to make java not be able to access the local file system or jni? just replace/overwrite some jar files (unless you have legal issues that preclude someone doing that).

but it is still a 3rd platform, and definatly a boon to python guys. now.. what to call the generic version? Python Hadoop, And Gql (PHAG?)

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Google's Appengine - some initial thoughts

Posted by Ian Holsman Tue, 08 Apr 2008 07:13:00 GMT

Google has just announced their alternative to Amazon’s s3 called ‘App Engine’. 

I think that if this is successful it will provide a shift in some of the basic web development economics and practices, even more than Amazon’s s3 has.

why?
- Small hosting providers (ones that offer a shell account for $12/month) will be marginalized. why pay for something when you get it for free?

- M&A. It will create a 3rd platform to develop on. you currently have LAMP and Windows. The google app engine provides a 3rd. The major difference is you can’t buy it. If we acquire a company who runs on this platform we have 2 choices. continue paying google for the infrastructure, or redevelop it onto LAMP. of course this suits google as their integration costs are lessened. Google might provide a ‘open source’ version of their infrastructure.. but I doubt it.

- Language choice. currently it only runs one language, python. They say they might support others in the future, but if not there will be a lot of people learning python (to the detriment of PHP, perl, and ruby), as well as new tools and utilities written in it. It’s going to give python a huge boost in usage

- Database choice. Google’s App Engine will be using ‘bigtable’ which is not a RDBMS, and uses a hacked up version of SQL. This impacts companies like mysql. you don’t need to worry about replication here Krow ;-)

- Applications are integrated into Google’s authentication system by default. you don’t even have your own list of users.

As a python developer I love it. It even has django out of the box, but I would be a bit cautious to base my startup on a infrastructure which can only be provided by a single company.. when I get a invite I will be porting my applications over to it.. hopefully by then someone would have ported their blogging software to it so i won’t have to.

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tagthe.net in python

Posted by Ian Holsman Tue, 06 Jun 2006 17:57:39 GMT

tagthe.net is a web service which tries to ‘guess’ tags for a given URL/piece of text.

for zyons I needed something to do this.

so I wrote a python client for tagthe.net

patches welcome..

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notice: my SVN area is moving

Posted by Ian Holsman Thu, 25 May 2006 20:41:00 GMT

The Fantastic folks at Python Hosting/WebFaction have offered to host the SVN repo for zyons, the django forum software we’ve developed.

Part of the deal is that we also get a Trac instance

I’ve hit a little snag, but it should repo should be available in 24-48 hours. (and I’ll take the chance to re-organize things as well).

the new SVN repo will be here now… to go and change all the references to it.

yay.. one less thing on my home computer! The sooner I can switch that box off the quieter my life will be.

update: it’s there now.. update your bookmarks!

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