{"id":124,"date":"2008-10-03T00:59:07","date_gmt":"2008-10-03T04:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/?p=124"},"modified":"2014-01-25T17:59:01","modified_gmt":"2014-01-25T21:59:01","slug":"google-app-engine-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/03\/google-app-engine-talk\/","title":{"rendered":"Google App Engine Talk"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today I went to a talk at UMBC on the <a href=\"http:\/\/code.google.com\/appengine\/\">Google App Engine<\/a>, a product from Google that came out earlier this year. The talk was given by an old friend of mine from Grad School who now works at Google. I was his partner for an Operating Systems project where we built a distributed file system using <a href=\"http:\/\/bamboo-dht.org\/\">Bamboo<\/a> and for a Database project where we built an Amazon-like online grocery store. He&#8217;s a pretty smart guy and is usually on top of the latest stuff, so I figured it&#8217;d be a really good talk.<\/p>\n<p>The Google App Engine basically allows web app developers access to some neat Google API&#8217;s and to have Google servers to host their application and its data. The main things I got out of the talk were:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Relational Databases don&#8217;t scale well. If you create an insanely popular app, your Relational Database could end up becoming a bottle neck. Google got around this by creating their own Database Management System called <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bigtable\">BigTable<\/a>. The Google App Engine lets you use BigTable for you apps.<\/li>\n<li>BigTable uses GQL, an SQL-like query language.<\/li>\n<li>Using the Google App Engine is free, however, there are certain storage and bandwidth limitations. I&#8217;m assuming that in the future they&#8217;ll charge users to go beyond the set limits, however, currently you cannot buy more space or bandwidth.<\/li>\n<li>If your application requires users to verify themselves, you can set things up so that users log in with their Google username and password.<\/li>\n<li>The same Google API&#8217;s that are available to in-house Google developers are available to you.<\/li>\n<li>Currently all Google App Engine apps have to be written in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.python.org\/\">Python<\/a>, which kind of sucks since it adds a barrier to entry. They do plan to support other languages, but that will be at some unknown point in the future.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I came away from the talk pretty impressed, however, I think I&#8217;ll wait to see what other languages they&#8217;ll support before trying it out.<\/p>\n<p>Besides the talk, it was neat to walk around campus again. It was a nice cool Fall day and everyone walking around seemed pretty laid back. I miss being able to get up at noon and then to waltz over to the food court to get some lunch. Everyone looked really young too, I wondered if I looked old to them. The experience reminded me of when another friend of mine stayed in my dorm room for St. Patrick&#8217;s Day after having been out in the working world a year. It seemed refreshing for him to be out walking around the campus again. He kept joking about wanting to be a life long college student and to get all of the degrees the school offered, which I think would be a lot of fun, if it paid well and people didn&#8217;t age (you wouldn&#8217;t want to be the old creepy guy living in the dorms).<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, if you have any thoughts or opinions on the Google App Engine feel free to share them. Right now I can&#8217;t recommend it one way or the other, since I haven&#8217;t tried it, but from all appearances, it looks really cool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today I went to a talk at UMBC on the Google App Engine, a product from Google that came out earlier this year. The talk was given by an old friend of mine from Grad School who now works at Google. I was his partner for an Operating Systems project where we built a distributed &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/03\/google-app-engine-talk\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Google App Engine Talk<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2743,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions\/2743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}