[Chicago] Google App engine is python powered

[Martin Maney]

On Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 11:50:44AM -0500, Chris McAvoy wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 11:40 AM, Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> wrote:
> >  I'm pretty stoked, though.  Python can finally take on PHP -- a far more
> >  worthy competitor than stupid Java.

Ian, I can't imagine what you mean by this.  PHP's virtue, such as it
is, is that it works "everywhere" (anyone know a hosting service worthy
of the name that doesn't offer PHP?).

> Indeed.   It's a pretty exciting time.  I'm still not entirely sure
> what to make of the new sql-free-stack that Amazon and Google are
> buying into.

Peter posted a link to a cautionary blog article about GoogApp whcih I
at first thought verged on paranoia:

  http://staticallytyped.com/2008/04/08/googles-plans-for-app-engine/

On digging deeper, I guess he has a point - they may include eg. the
Django framework, but without a relational db I can't see there being a
lot of point to it.  No models ("Since App Engine does not support
Django models..."), so no automagic CRUD, so... yeah, it is
lock-innish, but anyone who can't see that upfront needs to slapped
with an ice-cold trout.  Repeatedly.

And that does make it a lot less interesting to me, since I'm not in the
market for a pretty much complete rewrite of a Web 2.0 app that would
need the sort of huge scalability that Google can offer (when they get
the fee-based production version going).  Those who do need that
scalability - well, they shouldn't have any trouble weighing the pros
and cons.

-- 
If God did not exist, it would be necessary
for us to invent Him.  --Voltaire

...over and over again.  -- the empirical evidence