Something Completely Different Or Not?
A friend of mine pinged me on the email yesterday and asked me to check out something that he thought was cool.
It was the Google App Engine.
So I decided to take a look at what this thing is all about. Downloaded the SDK, Documentation (for offline viewing), Python 2.6 and started going through the tutorial and some of the webcasts.
After playing around a bit with it, I really find it quite interesting. Well, I'm pretty sure you've seen this sort of stuff before. It's really nothing new. You know, web MVC style application framework, but this time it is in Python and Django template, instead of ASP.NET, C# or VB.NET or Java, etc.
It came with some essential components like caching (Google implementation of memcache), email, queryable data store, & authentication (so you can login using your gmail account). You could also create your application and mash it up with some other online Google App like Spreadsheets, Picasa Web Album, etc. by using another downloable component.
One interesting note on the subject is that once your application has been developed and tested locally, you can (or rather, should?) upload them to Google and they'll host it for you online which is very nice. They provide the scalable infrastructure, with ample bandwidth and lots of other nice things like applications control panel, etc. Each Google account can have up to 10 separate applications hosted on Google AppEngine hosting space.
Speaking of Python, I've never really taken the time to actually seriously play with Python. Played around a little with IronPython, but that's about it. After playing around with the App Engine, I found the language to be quite enjoyable. The indentation rule sort of throw me off a bit (sort of brought me back to school when I had to do some COBOL and RPG programming, where indentation really matter, eeek), but you get used to it after a while.
Do we have something like this on Windows Live? Or will we have one soon?
Check it out, expand your horizon. It's fun :)