News

Google's App Engine: No Waiting

• By John K. Waters
• May 28, 2008

The Google App Engine is a set of tools and services designed to enable third-party developers to build and scale Web applications on Google's own infrastructure. Applications developed using the App Engine Software Development Kit (SDK) can be uploaded and hosted by Google. Those applications can then utilize Google's bandwidth and computing power.

The search giant first released the App Engine on April 7 as a limited-access preview, initially inviting about 10,000 developers to kick the tires, provide feedback, and help squash the bugs. The company began adding developers to the preview list almost immediately, and to date about 75,000 have tried out the system, said Google product manager Paul McDonald. An estimated 150,000 developers signed up for the access waiting list, McDonald said.

"We're very excited about this," McDonald said in a pre-conference interview. "No more list; no more waiting."

Google is unveiling two new App Engine APIs today at its developer conference in San Francisco. The first is the Image Manipulation API, which is designed to allow developers to resize, rotate, crop and enhance images on the server. It uses the technology behind Google's Picasa online photo-sharing Web site.

The second is the Memcached API, a scalable, high-performance caching layer that sits on top of Google's data store. Memcached allows developers to store the results of data-store queries in an in-memory cache, which speeds up page rendering.

Google also disclosed its plans for the App Engine's pricing structure. "We've gotten a lot of requests from developers to be more transparent about our pricing," said Google product manager Pete Koomen. "So we're releasing our plan early to get feedback, and to give developers a chance to plan ahead." Google doesn't yet have the ability to bill developers, Koomen said, but expects to have that system in place sometime later this year.

The company still plans to give away 500 MB of storage and enough bandwidth and compute power for about five million page views per month. After that, developers can expect to pay 10 to 12 cents per CPU core-hour, 15 to 18 cents per GB-month of storage, 11 to 13 cents per GB outgoing bandwidth, and 9 to 11 cents per GB incoming bandwidth.

The Google I/O Conference, which runs May 28-29 at San Francisco's Moscone Center West, is the company's largest ever developer conference. "We've had an incredible response to this event," McDonald said. "We planned it for a few thousand people and at last count we were getting close to 3,000 registered attendees."

At press time, Google's App Engine Web site had yet to be updated to reflect the public release.

Microsoft Releases ASP.NET MVC Preview 3

by Becky Nagel

This week Microsoft released the latest preview version of its model view controller (MCV) architecture for Web applications frameworks.

The debut of version 3 was announced Tuesday on the blog of Scott Guthrie, general manager of Microsoft's Developer Division. According to Guthrie, this version includes many of the changes detailed in a post in April, as well as several news ones, including additional improvements to the MVC Controller, bug fixes and additions for "HTML helper methods," plus a new URL routing engine that will also "ship in .NET 3.5 SP1 this summer," Guthrie wrote.

Another improvement Guthrie highlights is a "richer" URL route mapping offering, including support for new characters.

Guthrie also commented on changes planned for upcoming versions. "In future preview releases, you'll start to see more improvements higher-up the programming model stack in areas like Views (html helpers, validation helpers, etc), AJAX, sub-controllers and site composition, deeper Login, Authentication, Authorization and Caching integration, as well as data scaffolding support," he wrote in his post.

The preview is available for public download here. The source code is available here.