Webware

Technical difficulties forced Google's Web application hosting infrastructure off the air for about four hours Thursday morning.

Customers who run their Web applications on Google App Engine were forced idle Thursday by a series of issues involving "elevated Datastore latency and error-rates, as well as elevated serving error-rates," according to a Google employee posting in the Google App Engine Downtime Notify group spotted by TechCrunch. A Google representative acknowledged the downtime and apologized for the outage.

"Today at 8 am PT datastore access for App Engine applications was affected due to a cluster-wide issue. The team identified and fixed the underlying problem that caused the outage and service has now been restored to all applications. We apologize for the inconvenience and encourage anyone having technical difficulty to visit the System Status Dashboard or the Downtime Notify Group, which are both linked from the Google App Engine Community site."

Google's cloud-computing service allows Web developers who can't afford to host their own applications a place to get their work online. Amazon Web Services does something similar.

What do you do when you can use the Internet to data-mine a collection of billions of photos?

Find out whether cats are more popular than dogs, of course. Or whether good outdoes evil. Or the Yankees beat the Mets.

The FlickrTrends application takes advantage first of the API (application programming interface) at Yahoo's photo-sharing site, Flickr, which can show how many photos have been tagged with a particular word over a period of time. Second, it uses Google App Engine to present the relative popularity of two tags in chart form to show what's waxing and waning.

Corrected at 11:53 a.m. PDT. See below for details.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--In a case of converging technologies, Google App Engine took several steps toward the mainstream on its first birthday Tuesday at the same time that the concept of cloud computing in general is becoming more accepted.

Cloud computing presents applications as Internet-accessible services rather than software that runs on corporate servers or people's own PCs. It can mean anything from raw computing services that can be bolted together, as in the case of Amazon Web Services, to finished products such as the Picnik photo-editing site or SalesForce.com customer-management service. Google App Engine is an intermediate level, offering a general-purpose foundation.

Thus far, App Engine had been limited to Web applications written in the Python programming language favored internally at Google but not as much elsewhere. But on Tuesday, the top-requested App Engine feature, support for Java programs, arrived--albeit only in a preview form initially available only to the first 10,000 developers who sign up.

"It's the language of the enterprise," said Ryan Nichols, leader of product management and marketing at Appirio, a 140-person start-up that builds software for clients who want cloud computing applications. "It allows us to have a different level of conversation with our customers."

Graham Spencer, a Google engineering director, announces new features of Google App Engine at a Campfire One event Tuesday.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Google announced the Java support and a handful of other new App Engine features on its blog and at a Campfire One event for developers at its headquarters here. As with the regular App Engine service, use within certain limits is free, but developers must pay for heavy-duty App Engine use.

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Google announced Tuesday it's adding support for Java to App Engine, its service for running software on Google's own computing infrastructure.

Today, Google offers only applications written in Python, a language that's popular among the search giant's engineers but not as widely used in the outside world. Java, though, is commonplace among organizations' server software, and Java support was the top-requested feature for Google App Engine.

"I'm really excited to give you an early preview of Java language support on App Engine," Graham Spencer, a Google engineering director, said at the company's Campfire One event for developers Tuesday evening, one year after the initial Google App Engine launch.

Google also announced other features for Google App Engine, including a "cron" feature that lets people schedule specific jobs such as sending weekly reports, and a Secure Data Connector that lets Google App Engine employ private data stored behind a company firewall, said Kevin Gibbs, App Engine's technical leader. Also new is a large-scale data import tool designed to ease the movement of gigabytes of data to App Engine, which uses Google's BigTable technology for storing information.

The Java support is in a testing mode so Google can iron out issues such as compatibility with existing Java software development tools and frameworks, Gibbs said.

"We feel the support we're launching is not yet complete," Gibbs said.

The software is running a full version 1.6 Java virtual machine (JVM), the Java software component that actually runs Java programs once they're converted into an intermediate form called bytecode, Gibbs said. Because the JVM is running bytecode, other programming languages that can be converted to bytecode, including Ruby and JavaScript, also can run on App Engine, though Gibbs cautioned there could be bumps on that particular road.

Google's HTML 5-based Web version of Gmail shown on an Android phone

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--What Google did with Gmail in conventional browsers five years ago it is expecting to do again with a new mobile version of its Web-based e-mail service.

Vic Gundotra, who leads Google's mobile software and developer relations efforts, showed off the Web application "technical prototype" Friday in an onstage interview here at the Web 2.0 Expo. Google offers Gmail applications that run natively on BlackBerry and Android mobile phones, but the company clearly has high hopes for a Web-based version as well.

Building a Web interface means Google can reach more phones more easily, Gundotra said, as phone browsers get more sophisticated and their Internet connectivity gets better. "Imagine if you could build apps that ran across all these phones," Gundotra said.

As he did in a similar demonstration in February, Gundotra showed a version running on an iPhone and on a phone using Google's Android operating system--apparently the HTC Magic.

The software relied on features in HTML 5, the still-under-development version of the technology that underpins Web site design. Specifically, it used offline data access so the application could read e-mail even while there was no Internet connection.

"When we make it broadly available, people are going to see this as the first HTML 5 mobile application," Gundotra said, declining to say when it would become available. "It'll be like Gmail in 2004. It was a great watershed moment for Ajax apps," which employ JavaScript for relatively sophisticated browser-based interfaces.

Vic Gundotra, head of Google's mobile sofware and developer work, speaking at Web 2.0 Expo.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The mobile Gmail application also featured a floating toolbar that stayed perched at the top of the inbox, offering constant access to delete and archive buttons and a menu of further options.

Mobile is central to Google's work. The company already offers a search application for the iPhone and some other models that lets people issue queries by speaking rather than just typing. The accuracy of the speech recognition has improved 15 percent in the last quarter, Gundotra said, and usage of the service is growing fast.

Gundotra previously worked at Microsoft, but it was a few words from his then 4-year-old daughter that led him to Google. He'd told a friend he didn't know the answer to a question, and his daughter, overhearing, asked him, "Daddy, where's your phone?"

"In her brief four years of life, she assumed any time you didn't know the answer to a question, you brought out your phone. For her the phone was the ultimate answering machine," something that answered questions. That helped him realize that Google's mission of organizing the world's information and presenting it to people would happen in mobile phones, too.

Google likes HTML 5, but it'll take time for it to become adopted broadly. In the meantime, other alternatives exist for richer Internet applications, notably Adobe Systems' Flash. Also up and coming are a browserless relative of Flash from Adobe called AIR and a Flash rival from Microsoft called Silverlight.

Google showed off a better browser version of Gmail on the iPhone.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Asked about AIR, Gundotra said, "I think Adobe has got some great products," mentioning Google's use of Flash to power video streaming at YouTube. "There's also Silverlight from Microsoft. I am biased toward open Web standards," Gundotra said.

And he touted another HTML 5 feature: "I predict we will see video tag become broadly adopted," a technology that could enable video streaming without a Flash player, similar to the way Web browsers can show graphics without requiring separate plug-ins.

Gundotra also had words of praise for Google App Engine, a year-old service that can be used to run Web-based applications. One such application hosted on Google App Engine is Google Moderator, which lets people submit questions and rank which ones they want to hear answered. Moderator originated as a way for Google employees to ask questions of co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin during weekly employee meetings, Gundotra said.

Google was excited but scared when the White House said it planned to use Google Moderator for an online town hall meeting with President Barack Obama, Gundotra said.

But it held up under the load, and "the 45,000 other apps (on Google App Engine) were totally unaffected by this much scale," Gundotra said.

The town hall moderator system handled nearly 700 queries per second at its peak, with 3.6 million people voting on the questions they wanted to hear answered, he said.

Traffic spiked at Google Moderator when the White House used it to handle questions.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Google App Engine is growing a step more mature, with Google planning on Tuesday to begin allowing people using the cloud-computing foundation to pay for heavy use.

When Google launched App Engine last April, it was available only as a free service with caps on computing and network resource usage. Free use is still available for lower-traffic sites, but Google now lets users pay for higher access as needed.

"It's been one of our biggest developer requests," said Pete Koomen, Google App Engine product manager.

The billing feature makes Google App Engine useful for those who want to run real applications on the site, not just kick the tires, as long as they're willing to pay and to put up with the continued "preview release" status. However, the service hasn't even attained "beta" level, much less a service level agreement (SLA) that promises refunds if the service goes down for too long.

Google offers such an agreement for its Google Apps online tools. "It is something we are exploring" for Google App Engine, spokesman Jon Murchinson said.

Google App Engine competes with various other cloud-computing efforts, including Amazon's lower-level suite of Web services components, but mostly with the alternative of hosting applications on one's own equipment. Amazon Web services also uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Here's Google's description of how billing will work:

• $0.10 per CPU core hour. This covers the actual CPU time an application uses to process a given request, as well as the CPU used for any Datastore usage.

• $0.10 per GB bandwidth incoming, $0.12 per GB bandwidth outgoing. This covers traffic directly to/from users, traffic between the app and any external servers accessed using the URLFetch API, and data sent via the Email API.

• $0.15 per GB of data stored by the application per month.

• $0.0001 per email recipient for emails sent by the application

Koomen wouldn't comment on the matter, so you'll have to decide for yourself whether Google is trying to set prices low to attract users, medium to cover expenses, or high to generate revenue during Google's new era of financial discipline.

App Engine is designed to run Web applications written in the Python programming language, though Google plans to add other language support in the future. One of its chief selling points is that it's built on Google's computing infrastructure, letting applications rapidly scale if demand for them spikes without the organization running the application having to scare up a large number of new servers and network capacity.

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Google on Tuesday announced a dashboard to detail system status for the Google App Engine.

The move is the latest by a cloud provider to improve transparency in the event of an outage.

On the Google App Engine blog, the company said that it has launched the App Engine system status site and a quota dashboard to detail items like bandwidth usage and CPU. Google said it also plans a billing dashboard to preview what happens if you go beyond those quotas.

Here's a look at the dashboard:

(Credit: Google)

Reports out of a Google developer conference in India indicated that Google was primed to add support for Java programs running on its presently Python-only Google App Engine. Java support is a top request for the Web application hosting site, but fans would be better off holding their horses for now.

The reports based the Java-on-GAE conclusion on remarks from a speech by Prasad Ram, director of Google research and development in Bangalore. Google, though, said nothing is happening soon.

"While we don't have any immediate plans or announcements, we are working on other languages for App Engine. Security and performance are our primary concerns with any new language runtime and getting it right takes time," the company said in a statement. Google believes Ram was misquoted when discussing Java in regard to Google Web Toolkit, which converts Java software into JavaScript-powered Web site code.

Some Perl programming fans within Google are working on App Engine support, too, but it's an unofficial project.

When I was at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York last week, many of the panelists and speakers invited the audience to ask them questions by submitting Twitter messages. A Google engineer named Taliver Heath has gone one step further by creating Google Moderator, an application that lets the audiences at lectures and discussions submit questions and vote on the ones they'd like to hear answered.

Google Moderator, earlier named "Dory" after the inquisitive fish from Finding Nemo, started out as an internal tool. It was originally intended for the audiences at Google's "Tech Talks" series, then was extended to company all-hands meetings and other lectures at the company's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.

"There was never enough time for all the questions, and it wasn't clear that the best questions were the ones actually getting asked," Heath wrote in a blog post. "And since many of these talks were led by offices outside of Mountain View, it became harder for distributed audiences to participate."

After a few requests, Google has now released Moderator to the general public as part of its Google App Engine platform, and it's now available for free use. I'll start by asking a question about Moderator: What if audiences are too busy reading and voting on question submissions to actually listen?