On April 7th, Google announced their new offering called “AppEngine”. AppEngine is an environment that allows you to develop web based applications that run on Google’s scalable systems. AppEngine provides dynamic web serving, a “datastore” used to store your applications data, automatic scaling and load balancing and a downloadable development environment. The AppEngine framework is currently only for the Python language.

AppEngine is currently considered to be “beta”. The initial release is only available to the first 10,000 developers that signed up. I was able to snag one of the 10,000 beta slots and now have access to AppEngine. I have not yet downloaded their development environment. I currently do not know Python but I have developed applications over the last 22 years in at least 6 different programming languages. I have started to look at the basic Python syntax and it looks straightforward. I’ll write a couple of small Python apps and get a better feel for the capabilities prior to downloading the AppEngine development kit.

I think this has the potential to be big considering the AppEngine environment takes care of scalability and load balancing for you. Scalability is not easy to build into web applications but having a framework provide those capabilities and having Google’s scalable systems backing the environment will be enticing to many developers.

Check out Google’s own page covering “What is Google App Engine?” for all the details.