Google launched a limited access program for their Google App Engine. I landed solidly on the waiting list, but have been able to check out the local developer environment.

Bottom line: it’s very cool. It’s based on python with a very Django-like framework.

By far and away the coolest thing is the Google-proprietary Datastore/BigTable. This is Google’s approach to a database, except indexes, data replication, scalability, etc. are all managed for you. As an application developer, you can concentrate on your app logic and let the framework and infrastructure deal with these issues. Oh, and by the way, all the indexes and interfaces work exactly the same on the local dev environment as they do in this expansive Google compute cloud.

To be clear, in my experience with large webapps, data scalability and availability is precisely the place where a team will spend most of their time. The Google App Engine eliminates this for you.

This is a real testament to Google’s insistence and persistence on building out a world-class infrastructure and a super-solid architecture layer to build upon. Remember, this company did almost nothing other than search for the first 4 or 5 years. They had lots of employees back them too (not like today, of course), but instead of building out gobs of applications, they focused on the underlying architecture pieces and produced things like Datastore. This sort of investment has a massive flywheel effect over time.

Back to Google App Engine: it will be great to find out what G’s roadmap is for this product if one is seriously considering hosting their corporate apps. In the mean time, Google App Engine is a pretty serious endorsement for python/Django.

I love Ruby as a language, but damn I’m starting to have a tough time finding a place for Rails.