Google Talk #1 – All about App Engine with Google’s Fred Sauer

You work on Google Web Toolkit as well. Is there any reason adoption seems to be slow in enterprises? The Eclipse User Survey showed only 3% used GWT.
The one problem that I see with GWT is that it’s very difficult discovering customers using GWT. What tends to happen is that developers at a company will look at GWT, look at alternatives, and decide to use it. They download GWT, play along happily, and build applications.

Years down the road, we might just randomly hear from them at a developer conference, or maybe because they’ve built an interesting tool on top and they’ve reached out because they’d like to do a guest blog post. In the companies I talk to, there are different sets of developer skills. You have shops where people write PHP and Perl, and that’s their way of life. There’s the Ruby-on-Rails shops, the jQuery shops; but when you’re talking about enterprise customers, more often than not you have a very strong Java skill set in the organisation.

When you talk to Java developers and show them how easy it is to build applications with GWT, they’re immediately sold on it. I have yet to speak to a Java developer who has used it who wants to go back to the way they did things before.

What’s the strangest application hosted on App Engine?
The strangest applications have to be the ones I haven’t even heard about. We have 100,000 active applications on App Engine today, and the vast majority of those we don’t know what they are or what they’re doing. We know there are cool apps there. We’ve seen a custom shoe designer, Shoes of Prey, where you can go in online and customise your shoe, choose different colours or types of leather. They sell women’s shoes, and they’re doing all their hosting application and logic on App Engine.

We see some innovative things going on, such as The Guardian in the UK. They built some micro-applications on App Engine to bring their readers closer to the editors and reporters. Last week on our blog, we had a company in the UK called Little Fluffy Toys, a boutique Android development shop. They built an application to allow you to reserve bicycles in London. We blogged about it because it was such an interesting story.

They went to a development event we hosted and learned about App Engine. They started writing and within a week they had an application up and running and had users coming to their site. They learned Python, learned App Engine and deployed an application in a week. I just think, back in the day, even if you had developers who could learn the language in a week, they’d still have to configure databases and put them up, figure out the log files and how to deal with them etc. This allowed them to really help their users out.

There are a lot of languages that run on top of the JVM (Java Virtual Machine), like Scala and Ruby. Will those work in App Engine?
Certainly, any language that runs on the JVM can potentially run in App Engine. In some cases, because of the nature of the languages – for example, a server you start up once a day or once a week and leave it forever – there are some startup challenges some of these JVM languages have. We’ve been chipping away at the request latency these languages produce to make them first-class languages.

We have a strong community of users using some of these other languages. One of the App Engine engineers is a big Ruby fan, so he’s working to make Ruby work even better with App Engine. We’re trying to better address the business needs for longer-running services and longer-running requests, and these needs align themselves with these languages. There’s a bit more work to do to make all Ruby and all Scala applications work extremely well. Let’s say we’re at the beta stage with those languages.

What’s next for App Engine?
We’re filling in the details of our announcement earlier this year on App Engine for business. We’re doing things like providing support-level agreements, adding a new pricing model for businesses for internal applications to allow for more predictable pricing. One of the big things everyone has been asking for is new SQL support. We’re working on having a relational SQL database on App Engine, so you can better leverage those existing skill sets that really assume relational databases. That’s the area we’re seeing the most interest right now.

On the non-App Engine for business side, one of our engineers built The Mapper, which is the first step in our long-term efforts to provide map/reduce functionality. This is one of the essential features that underlies web search. That’s something we want to support in App Engine. Ultimately, we want App Engine to be the platform that can run any type of application. The engineer who wrote The Mapper did it entirely in user space. It’s an API you install in your application. We’re already seeing some interesting things people are doing with The Mapper.

Don’t forget to let us know what you think of the first part of our Google Talk series in the comments thread below.

You may also like: Google Talk #2 – Google Web Toolkit & WebM

You can find out what else featured in issue 91 of Linux User & Developer here…