Google App Engine took several steps toward the mainstream on its first birthday on Tuesday, at a time when the concept of cloud computing in general is becoming more accepted.
Cloud computing presents applications as internet-accessible services rather than software that runs on corporate servers or people's own PCs. It can mean anything from raw computing services that can be bolted together, as in the case of Amazon Web Services, to finished products such as the Picnik photo-editing site or Salesforce.com customer-management service.
Google App Engine is an intermediate level, offering a general-purpose foundation.
Thus far, App Engine had been limited to web applications written in the Python programming language favoured internally at Google but not as much elsewhere. But on Tuesday, the top-requested App Engine feature — support for Java programs — arrived, albeit only in a preview form initially available only to the first 10,000 developers who sign up.
"It's the language of the enterprise," said Ryan Nichols, leader of product management and marketing at Appirio, a 140-person start-up that builds software for clients who want cloud-computing applications. "It allows us to have a different level of conversation with our customers."
Google announced the Java support and a handful of other new App Engine features on its blog and at a Campfire One event for developers at its headquarters in Mountain View, California. As with the regular App Engine service, use within certain limits is free, but developers must pay for heavy-duty App Engine use.
Cloud advocacy
The idea of cloud computing is catching on, and Google is a major proponent. Even Microsoft, whose twin cash cows of Windows and Office today are tethered to physical machines, plans cloud-based versions of both those products.
About 150,000 developers have built 50,000 applications on App Engine so far, Google said, and those apps draw about 100 million page views per day. The most popular is BuddyPoke, which provides social-networking sites with an application that people add and control avatars. It has 35 million users.
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Meanwhile, BestBuy, eBay and Forbes "have started to outsource pieces" of their computing operations to App Engine, said Graham Spencer, a Google engineering director.
Cloud computing can bring penalties such as primitive user interfaces, long waits for services to respond, and problems when the network is down or unavailable. In-house computing systems are not infallible, but when cloud-computing services fail, customers are beholden to another company's skills at restoring them.
But all these areas are being addressed, and cloud computing has some advantages, too. Online documents can more easily be shared or collaboratively authored. Applications are available from...
