…

The Google platform is very much Beta. Of course they want people beating it to death.

I believe that this is strategic for Google. Sure the tools aren’t there, you can’t install “x” where “x” is your current tool du jour, but just as with Amazon’s EC2, the middleware and tool-smiths will be there very rapidly.

It comes down to this: do you want to maintain racks of servers, or pay someone else to host that, or do you want to use companies that have proven they manage 100% uptime on, for all practical purposes, an infinite server base?

As chief “yelling at people about the cloud” geek at Alpha Software, I’ve been playing with EC2 for awhile, and I’ll be playing with Google’s AppEngine asap.

The cloud, IMHO, is the future, whether you grok it now or not.

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine\appcfg.py”, line 48, in
execfile(script_path, globals())
File “C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine\google/appengine/tools/appcfg.py”, line 1530, in
main(sys.argv)
File “C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine\google/appengine/tools/appcfg.py”, line 1526, in main
AppCfgApp(argv).Run()
File “C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine\google/appengine/tools/appcfg.py”, line 1201, in Run
self.action.function(self)
File “C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine\google/appengine/tools/appcfg.py”, line 1405, in Update
lambda path: open(os.path.join(basepath, path), “rb”))
File “C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine\google/appengine/tools/appcfg.py”, line 1049, in DoUpload
missing_files = self.Begin()
File “C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine\google/appengine/tools/appcfg.py”, line 910, in Begin
version=self.version, payload=self.config.ToYAML())
File “C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine\google/appengine/tools/appcfg.py”, line 264, in Send
self._Authenticate()
File “C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine\google/appengine/tools/appcfg.py”, line 301, in _Authenticate
super(HttpRpcServer, self)._Authenticate()
File “C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine\google/appengine/tools/appcfg.py”, line 214, in _Authenticate
auth_token = self._GetAuthToken(credentials[0], credentials[1])
File “C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine\google/appengine/tools/appcfg.py”, line 159, in _GetAuthToken
response = self.opener.open(req)
File “C:\Python25\lib\urllib2.py”, line 381, in open
response = self._open(req, data)
File “C:\Python25\lib\urllib2.py”, line 399, in _open
‘_open’, req)
File “C:\Python25\lib\urllib2.py”, line 360, in _call_chain
result = func(*args)
File “C:\Python25\lib\urllib2.py”, line 1115, in https_open
return self.do_open(httplib.HTTPSConnection, req)
File “C:\Python25\lib\urllib2.py”, line 1082, in do_open
raise URLError(err)
urllib2.URLError:

C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine\demos\helloworldsubin>

It’s not how the app performs at this early stage, it was henry’s experience in getting it running and deployed, and how well he told the tale in such an economical way. The story of the google cloud has not even begun.

A year from now, this is going to be the shiz. As far as Python as the initial language, it could have been worse.