Business Tech

Software development "in the cloud" has been one of the really interesting developments to come out of the cloud computing market so far. While many early players, such as Zimky and Coghead died on the vine, there is a pretty robust Platform as a Service (or "PaaS") market out there today, with Google App Engine taking the most visible lead, and a pretty solid stable of Ruby on Rails-based hosting providers telling a compelling story of their own.

Such success is driving some new players to seek the spotlight, however. I wanted to highlight two that I found most interesting. They are very different from one another, but those differences highlight the breadth of opportunity that remains in the PaaS market.

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 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.

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.

The goliaths of the Internet are dangling an ever-larger supply of bootstraps for folks who want to try new ideas for the Web.

The first case in point is Google App Engine, an infrastructure that lets people run their Web applications on Google's servers, for free up until certain limits are set. Second is Yahoo's BOSS (build your own search service) that lets people extract Yahoo search results, reorder them, and mix them with other content--also without constraint within certain limits.

A rough-and-ready search engine Vik Sighn created to show how a Python programming library used to process Yahoo's BOSS-based search results on Google App Engine.

(Credit: Vik Singh)

On Monday, Yahoo programmer Vik Singh, who has been involved in the BOSS project, released software that lets those two projects work together. Specifically, he adapted a package called the BOSS Mashup Framework (BMF), which provides some pre-written tools to let programmers more easily use Yahoo search data via the BOSS interface, so it runs on Google's App Engine.

"Running BMF on top of Google App Engine is a seemingly natural progression, and quite arguably the easiest way to deploy Boss--so I spent today porting BMF to the GAE platform," Singh said on his blog.

Those tools, called a library, are written in the Python programming language that so far is App Engine's only native language.

Singh also built an example application: the Question-Answering Service. (Don't expect infallibility, but it does answer some questions correctly.) There was a day when this sort of thing, even this imperfect, would require a lot more resources than just a few dozen lines of source code. You'd have to assemble a lot of servers to index the Internet, analyze the results, process queries, and serve up results.

Another example Singh mentioned is called 4HourSearch, so named because it took four hours for programmer Sam Pullara to whip it together, according to his blog. The search site presents a Yahoo-powered interface that mirrors that of Cuil, a loudly trumpeted would-be Google slayer.

Google programmers are adding support for the Perl programming language to its App Engine service for hosting Web applications, but so far it's not really an official project.

The work is the project of Google employee Brad Fitzpatrick, who disclosed the project on his blog Tuesday. But he's not a member of the App Engine team, and Google isn't promising Perl support, he said. By going public with the project, he hopes to intercept other Perl fans' work in the area.

"I (along with other Perl hackers here at Google) are now allowed to work on this 20 percent project of ours out in the open where other Perl hackers can help us out, should you be so inclined," Fitzpatrick said. (Google permits engineers to spend 20 percent of their work time on pet projects.)

"Here at Google...it's not one of our big languages so I don't get to write as much Perl as I used to. I'd still like to run my personal Web apps on App Engine, though, and I'd like to write them in Perl," he said.

Google plans to add new languages to App Engine, but hasn't yet said which. Perl ranks fourth on the list of desired App Engine languages, after Java, PHP, and Ruby.

Check Fitzpatrick's post for details on the roadmap and what he thinks is necessary to make Perl a full-fledged part of App Engine.