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We’re here at the Google campfire event, where Google is celebrating the first birthday of App Engine and is planning planning to unveil new developer-related features. The event is being held in Google’s Building 43 instead of an outdoor amphitheater because of rain, but Google has decked out the room with a virtual fireplace, log podium, and atmospheric lighting.
At this point Google hasn’t publicly announced what they’re launching tonight. We’ve heard that Java might be coming soon, but that could also be coming at Google’s I/O conference next month.
We’ll begin live blogging as soon as the event begins. For now, we’re live streaming video from inside the virtual campfire.
Update:Here is the link for the Java Signup For App Engine – First 10,000 developers to sign up get access.
7:37 PM PST: The event is starting
- Google launched App Engine because people were spending too much time as Sys Admins rather than building their web apps.
- 150,000 developers have built more than 50,000 applications
- Google has started using App Engine internally, including Google Moderator, which was built as a way for Google employees to ask questions during company meetings. Recently Whitehouse.gov used it for its Town Hall.
- Google has been soliciting feedback from devs for the last year. Based on that, they have new features for tonight. Including cron support, database importing, access to firewalled data, and Java Support
- And… we’ve just had a BSOD… (back in action 20 seconds later)
- Developers want to be able to pay to use more App Engine to allow for scaling. About a month ago Google gave developers the ability to pay for extra usage
- Cron support allows developers to execute regularly scheduled tasks.
- It can be challenging to move data into and out of App Engine. Tonight we’re announcing large scale import tool. Also working on an export tool, so you can move gigs of data off so you can get local backup copy.
- Next feature is exciting for enterprise developers. They’d like a way to connect to things behind firewalls. Tonight, we’re announcing the Secure Data Connector (SDC). SDC is built around having an agent inside the firewall, which connects to servers inside of Google, giving Google servers policy controlled access to data you’ve chosen to expose.
- SDC was meant to be simple, secure and open. All data is encrypted with SSL. You don’t have to change network settings changes, it only makes outbound connections. Policies at Application, User, and URL level.
- Mark Woollen VP Social CRM at Oracle has taken the stage. Google allows Google SDC and Oracle servers to connect – giving an example of using it to build an app for servers behind a firewall. Going to be available for Oracle Siebel servers in May 2009, with beta available before that.
- Google has taken the stage again. Tonight we’re exciting our early look at Java for App Engine. Why an early look? We feel the support is not yet complete, details to work out. We want to learn what things need to be adjusted.
- Giving an end to end solution of Java runtime for App Engine, Eclipse, and Google Web Toolkit – allows you to build client and server together in one experience with one language.
- Full Java 1.6
- Google Plugin for Eclipse. Integrates every step of app development. Also have standalone tools.
- Java Standards – 100% standards based.
- They just built a guest book using Java in less than ten minutes (explaining every step along the way). Here it is, go nuts.
- IBM Cloud team has taken the stage. Taking the GuestBook code from the previous example. Has deployed code to IBM. Interface to Tivoli LDAP and DB2, IBM Web Sphere.
- Google Web Toolkit. We’re now building a better UI for the guestbook.
- Iein Valdez of Appirio has taken the stage, showed off building an enterprise app for App Engine.
- Here is the link for the Java Signup For App Engine – First 10,000 developers to sign up get access.
C’mon PHP! :/
anything buy python. I’m sure is good once you get use to the white space, but I don’t really want to learn a new language.
grvy, java, jscript, php, perl would be the order of my pref.
*but python. can’t type today
After shutting Lively, they are supporting Java to compete flash in ria. But java slows the machine and even hangs it.
Java baby! Java!
This opens the door to so many other options from grvy to jruby and etc.
I don’t understand how come Michael only writes about twitter and nothing else….
If GAE will support PHP.. it’s use will skyrocket like you’ve never seen before..
I think this is the main reason why they haven’t enabled it yet.. It would be a small, but much appreciated miracle if PHP support would be announced today
I’m also opting for Ruby on Rails (which suits better in Google’s philosophy = easier code)
- on Rails *
Well, there is JRuby…
Why not look at Azure? They already support PHP and RoR, see this example:
http://blog.sma...n-windows-azure
The fire seems so real :p
PHP, pappa needs a new pair of shoes!
Java would be nice. Sweet cake!
Exciting, although I’m not too impressed with Qik so far. Is this the only stream available?
Once Java is available, no doubt someone will port JRuby, Quercus (PHP in Java), Groovy, Scala, et al. The JVM opens the doors to tons of languages to be hosted on AppEngine.
Most of the languages you’ve listed are operating at the bytecode level and I’m pretty sure that AppEngine will disallow that
(it is very similar to what they’ve done in Android). So the only remaining option is to have those run in interpreted mode, but I don’t think any of them works that way.
I’ll have to check the SDK to be sure though.
AppEngine does not disallow it and AppEngine is not running some Dalvik VM. It is JDK 1.6. Only a few obvious APIs are disallowed.
Also, Scala and PHP on the JVM don’t rely on runtime bytecode manipulation anyway. I believe even Groovy has a pre-compiler Groovyc.
From the section “The Java Runtime Environment” on http://code.goo...eappengine.html
“Typically, Java developers use the Java programming language and APIs to implement web applications for the JVM. With the use of JVM-compatible compilers or interpreters, you can also use other languages to develop web applications, such as JavaScript, Ruby, or Scala.”
Good enterprise additions to the cloud so far. The bulk load and Secure Data Connection features alone are going to put Google back into the enterprise cloud game.
Nice coverage. Looking forward to Java support for a long time.
> And… we’ve just had a BSOD… (back in action 20 seconds later)
Serves you right for using Windows
Heh, just to be clear it was Google’s presenting computer, not mine..
That computer looks like a Mac to me. Is it?
more proof that google is possibly a 700 billion dollar company in the not so distant future.
could turn out to be a fireball… Amazon servers are it, google should let it go for shared infrastructure, focus sharing advertising information.
So will it be Java on AppEngine all the way? Full Java 6 for the server and GWT for the client side? Yummy!
Link to the documents?
I can’t seem to get to the Java SignUp URL..:-(
The correct URL for signing up is http://appengin...mo/java_runtime
Thanks a lot.
thanks!
Did anyone actually get the invitation to email after signing up? How long will that take?
No, not yet…
Here it is:
“Hello,
Thanks for signing up to try Google App Engine for Java! Your account has now
been activated, so you can begin building applications with our new Java
runtime.”
(approx. 1 hour ago)
I got mine within an hour…
Just having trouble creating an application though. I get a weird “This application ID or version is already in use.” error message.
Last picture (hot cocoa) is interestning. Are they planning the Apple’s Cocoa support?
That’s like asking if they are planning gtk support. Cocoa isn’t a language.
If you enable it can it work beside the Python code?
To the PHP ppl….
PHP already has a million other cheap-ass hosting options. Java, on the other hand, has only expensive & crappy ones.
Java needs this more than PHP.
+1, +1, +1, +1, +1, +1 …
Which of those cheapass options comes out of the box with an infinitely scalable datastore, no need to worry about sharding, et al?
The best thing about Java support is that we should also be able to use other JVM based languages like
1. Scala
2. JRuby
3. Clojure
4. Groovy
and many more.
Checking it out. Lucky me, I still got 15 apps to create from my two accounts
. Never knew that Google now requires a phone number for each new registered app. Guess I could resell some of mine 
.
w00t!
Nice stuff! Java is a powerful platform, and also comes with the easy to use scripting languages like Grails.
Let’s see how Google App engine will do compared to Amazon’s cloud services.
Currently, there’s no Grails support with GAE. They do support plain “groovlets” if you’re interested in using Groovy (which I am). It sounds like they’re going to provide Grails support in the near future, but it didn’t work out of the box, so there’s still some tweaking to do. It’ll be interesting to see if this ends up giving Groovlets a PR boost, and perhaps gets more people using them instead of defaulting to Grails for Groovy web work.
Did you test running groovlets on GAE?
Rather than giving Google access to your enterprise database with their experimental SDC, isn’t it better to run your own web servers and connect to your enterprise database over your own VPN with your own ODBC Router ( http://phpodbc.com/ ) that you completely control? If you are willing to surrender your data to Google, it has near infinite capacity, but who needs that with virtualization (either off the shelf like thegridlayer.com or even using regular virtual machines that can be quickly booted onto one or more free ESXi devices over the network ( http://vmetc.co...ally-supported/ ).
I tried it out Java for App Engine and it was smooth sailing deploying Hello World. Screenshots of the eclipse plugin are on my blog:
http://blog.tec...n-for-java.html
Python is really easy to learn, quite simple.
I only followed the docs and just setup a website from the ground in only few hours.
I love python now.
hope there will be more runtime on Google App Engine.
python, java, php, maybe .net! ha.
I’ve blogged about how to deploy a simple app without the Eclipse plugin: here