Web Platforms for Python

1. make it easy to use
2. make it easy to scale
3. free to start (small apps)

What Google will do for you:

1. Run the web applications
2. provide the full life cycle, logs, status, updating, database...
3. provide access to Google's scalable infrastructure, google accounts, big table, Google FS

To do this the application stack they provide has:

1. Scalable serving infrastructure
2. Python runtime
3. SDK
4. Web based administration console
5. Datastore (based on big Table)

Their environment does allow you to run a local test server, so you can do your application development on your own private machine.

They provide a basic Django template module.

Seems to follow the Python wsgiref module.

An initial presentation of this is in these videos.

One of the things this does is to get you to build things using Google tools which may result in an implementation that is difficult to move to some other service provider without doing a complete rewrite. Whereas if you were using Amazon's EC2 you are writing for a more standard LAMP style environment so you should be able to take whatever you develop and run it somewhere else. Of course, if you keep this all in mind it might not be a big issue, use the Google tools to develop a prototype and test the waters before investing in a full scale project.

With Google's use of Python as the first application language to be supported by this system it has caused an unprecedented stir in the Python community, see:

• Simon Brunning
• Ivan Krstić
• Pirnat.com
• Sean McGrath
• Steve Holden
• Titus Brown
• Pythoneering
• Simon Brunning
• Django on AppEngine the TomatoBase project.
• Phillip Pearson who observes that this could be a very big thing for small projects as it appears to scale down well.
• Dave Winer calls Google's AppEngine the new BASIC.
• Django on Google App Engine in 13 simple steps a short tutorial by Thomas Røst.
• Brett Taylor (who claims to have been the PM of the App Engine project in June'07) proves that a small application is easy to write by writing his own blog with it.
• OpenID can be used instead of Google's Account support.
• Ian Bicking talks about this from the perspective of the small application.
• in Return of the Unofficial Python Job Board Feed we see some limitations of the current Google App Engine API appear, such as the lack of scheduled background tasks and task queues.