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Google plans to release later this week a near-final version of the Google Web Toolkit 1.5, software designed to ease the onerous parts of writing sophisticated Web-based software.

GWT 1.5 includes support for Java 5, a version of the Sun Microsystems programming language released in 2006, and produces software that runs about 1.2 to 2 times faster for complex Web applications, said Bruce Johnson, Google's engineering manager for GWT.

The new software fuels Google's ambition to make the Web a much richer software environment--an ambition on display Wednesday and Thursday at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. Johnson believes the Web is already "really close" to the abilities of personal computers as a software foundation.

"We've observed that there's no question anymore whether you're going to target the browser or a desktop app. For almost any new exciting app, you're going to target the browser," Johnson said. "For the right set of applications, it's already better than what you can do on the desktop. For extremely low-latency applications, like video editing, I think we're still a couple years out."

Google is trying to shift people toward the Web, hoping to profit indirectly by spurring more Internet searches, its main source of revenue. It's also got some direct but much smaller businesses, including subscription fees for corporate use of online Google Apps such as its spreadsheet and calendar. Also at Google I/O, the company is revealing the fees for heavy users of its new Google App Engine service to host Web applications.

App Engine, which was unveiled in April and now has about 60,000 approved users, is free for starter applications requiring 500MB of storage and network bandwidth to support about 5 million page views a month, Google said. On Wednesday, the service will be open to the 150,000 who've signed up so far and to any others who want to join.

Beyond that, Google will charge 10 to 12 cents per hour of processor core work, plus 15 to 18 cents per gigabyte of storage per month, plus 11 to 13 cents per gigabyte of data transferred out, plus 9 to 11 cents per gigabyte of data transferred in. The fees are similar in broad structure to that of a competing service from Amazon.

GWT: Doing the grunt work
GWT lets programmers write their code in Java, but then converts that raw material into the JavaScript language that's built into Web browsers. One advantage of GWT is that it can handle the significant differences in how different browsers handle JavaScript, Google argues.

"Not all the JavaScript standards are interpreted in different ways," Johnson said. "The truth is it's a minefield."

GWT supports most modern browsers, including recent versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari (and other Webkit-based browsers such as that of the iPhone and Google Android), and Opera.

Sun introduced more changes to Java with the current Java 6, but it was Java 5 that introduced several changes to the language. Among them (brace yourself if you're not a coder): generics, enumerated types, annotations, enhanced for/loop syntax, and autoboxing.

Supporting those newer features makes GWT less different from other Java programming environments, cuts down on opportunities for programmer mistakes, and can help GWT produce faster JavaScript, Johnson said.

GWT uses the Eclipse project's JDT to understand people's Java code, then adds a Google-engineered component that translates it into JavaScript, Johnson said.

It's open-source software, and "We get dozens and dozens of patches" from outside contributors. Among those in the current release is support for right-to-left languages such as Arabic.

Just because Google so obviously loves the idea of cloud computing, don't think the company doesn't care about what happens at the other end of the network connection, too.

As former President Bill Clinton used to say, there's a third way: Google wants to improve technology on both the server in the cloud and on the client running a Web browser. The search giant will detail its approach to at least 2,800 developers paying to attend the first Google I/O conference this week in San Francisco.

Vic Gundotra, head of developer evangelism and open-source projects at Google

(Credit: Google)

There's been a long-running tension among computing companies about where the brains of the computing operation reside. In early years, central servers did all the work and people connected through "dumb terminals" that did nothing but display text. Then the personal computer revolution took off, and companies such as Microsoft whose software ran on these "clients" prospered. Now it's the Internet era, and Google wants a little of both.

"We are going to make the cloud more accessible. And we're going to make the browser more capable," said Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering in charge of developer evangelism and open-source software.

Clouds and clients and connections, oh my
Google isn't showing its Google I/O cards beforehand, but here's my translation of Gundotra's opening keynote themes--"Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud"--into some specific projects under way at Google. For client, think Google Gears for running Web applications even when offline. For cloud, think Google App Engine, a site to house Web applications. And for connectivity, think Android, the mobile phone software package.

The Android software itself is under development at Google, with help from a number of partners in the Open Handset Alliance. To make that project successful--in particular its promise as an open foundation with a vibrant programming community--there needs to be software for Android, too.

Google has been trying to jump-start the Android developer program. It launched a developer contest that drew 1,788 submissions. I'm guessing Google will announce the winner from the top 50 finalists (and click here for a PDF of the top 50 Android apps in slideware form).

A sample Android application, AndroidGlobalTime

(Credit: Google)

More newsworthy, though, is the likelihood of a second software development kit (SDK) for Android. "We are working on those things in the next day or so," Gundotra said of the SDK last week. "Android is a big portion of how we make pervasive connectivity useful."

Google vs. Microsoft
We in the media are doubtless too susceptible to narratives that pit one company against another, but in Google's case, there really is a big rivalry with Microsoft. The search giant is trying to make into reality the fear Microsoft had in the 1990s about Netscape, that the Web browser would supplant the operating system as the way people used their computers.

Gundotra has seen it from both sides. Before joining Google in 2007, he was general manager for platform evangelism at Microsoft, the culmination of a 15-year stint at the company.

But does Google want to dominate the Web platform the way Microsoft has with the operating system platform? Emphatically not, said Gundotra, who took pains to note that the I/O in Google I/O stands for "innovation in the open."

"Today, the most interesting and dominant platform is not the closed, proprietary platforms of the past, but the open Web...It's the platform adopted by all of us because it isn't controlled by any of us," Gundotra said. "Google's motivation is to move the Internet forward as fast as we can."

That's not to say Google isn't interested in bringing home the bacon. But its Web platform work has only an indirect connection to Google's revenue and profits.

Gundotra repeated what's become a familiar refrain to me as I've asked various Google executives about how their initiatives make money: "We have an economic reason to move (the Web) forward. As it gets richer, better apps, it gets more users. More users using more apps leads to more Google searches, and that leads to more revenue for us," he said.

Android is another target aimed at Microsoft. It will become freely available open-source software--or at least 8.6 million of its 11 million lines of code will be--with the specific intent of providing an alternative to Microsoft's mobile version of Windows. Wind River Systems wants to profit from it directly by helping phone companies build it into their products, but Google thus far has voiced no such ambition.

Lighting a fire under Web 2.0
App Engine and Gears together are centerpieces of Google's attempt to bring the Web alive, and we can expect some action there at the conference, too.

But developers are likely to be disappointed in hearing about one area in which they're hungry for news: support for other programming languages besides Python in App Engine. Java, Ruby, PHP, and Perl support are the top four requests in the App Engine issue tracker, and JavaScript, C#, and ColdFusion Markup Language are in the top 25.

"You can assume from that ranking what we're working on, but not what we'll announce next week," Gundotra said. And he wouldn't offer a specific time frame. "We're actively working on it. It's difficult for us to know until development gets further along."

The company is pleased with the progress so far. It's granted App Engine access to 60,000 developers so far, said Tom Stocky, director of product management for developer products.

Gundotra promises that App Engine isn't a lock-in strategy to lure application developers irreversibly to Google's part of the cloud.

"It is hosting the same open LAMP stack people are used to," he said, referring to the combination of the Linux operating system, Apache Web server software, MySQL database software, and Perl, Python, and PHP programming languages to run Web applications themselves. "If you decide you don't want to use it, you could easily revert back to using your own data center."

Well, maybe not easily. App Engine ties into the Google-only BigTable service for housing data. But the company is working on an export ability for data, and there's an open-source implementation of BigTable, Stocky said.

Giving Gears
The company claims to be equally giving with Google Gears, an open-source project that Google released in beta version to enable richer Internet applications. Specifically, it lets browsers store data better in a local database, work offline, synchronize once they're online again, and run JavaScript more efficiently.

It's hard to find Google Gears used beyond Google Docs, Zoho's competing online office applications, and Google Reader. Gundotra is happy to declare the project a success in another way, though: its influence on version 5 of HTML. Indeed, a draft of the HTML 5 specification includes interfaces for handling database storage and offline work.

"You're right on the cusp of seeing a slew of apps come out that use the HTML 5 and Gears features that redefine what a Web app can do," Gundotra said. "We're working to drive that innovation, and also to drive that back into standards...We think we contributed to the evolution of the Web."

Google's AppEngine looks great. It's a way to build web applications and run them on Google's "cloud" infrastructure.

The downside? Your applications effectively become Google's applications because there's no easy way to move them elsewhere. You have to run them using Google's authentication engine, framework, file system, APIs, etc. Free as in Google's.

Enter Morph Labs.

[Morph] claims to have done all the back-end cutwork to make it easy for developers to get their software up and running as a service on Amazon's Web Services (AWS), freeing them from Google's Microsoft-like vendor lock-in....

... Read more

As people get their heads around Google App Engine, they see some things they may not like. Namely, the dreaded "lock-in."

Developers for years have been clamoring for more openness and standards. They are tenets of the open-source movement.

But as more application development moves to hosted platforms, does data and application portability get lost in "the cloud"?

Given that we're at an early point in platform-as-a-service offerings, I'd say lock-in, to some degree, is inevitable. Most people consider Salesforce.com's Force.com closed, as it's based on the company's database and query language.

But Google? The search giant is hosting a Web development conference next month, not to sell more software stacks or subscriptions, but to encourage more apps--and people--to move to the Web, it says.

Still, O'Reilly takes Google to task for the lack of application portability--at least in this first iteration of Google App Engine.

"Now, it may be that this is a temporary oversight, and that Google does intend, long-term, to make it easy for developers to export their applications. After all, Eric Schmidt says he reminds his employees all the time, "Don't fight the Internet."

But it's also possible that this is one more sign that one of the big guys is forgetting the principles--the Internet as a platform (not "my company as a platform"), harnessing the power of user contribution (which, as John Musser pointed out, means that you always "pay the user first"), small pieces loosely joined--that brought their success in the first place.

Think his concerns are overblown? He's not the only one.

Within a few days of its release, programmer Chris Anderson wrote some open-source software, called AppDrop, that shows that you can conceivably run an instance written for Google App Engine on Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon's hosted server platform.

Developer Alex Bosworth listed lock-in as his top concern with Google App Engine.

It's likely that Google will allow applications written with other languages, like JavaScript. But the nub of online-platform lock-in comes from the data store, Bosworth said.

One thing both Amazon and Google could do to really show they are serious about their platforms is open up their data engines, which are really the core of most Web applications--open-source BigTable and SimpleDB. This would really reduce lock-in and make development easier, and it might even lead to some help improving their services.

O'Grady at RedMonk, too, argued that Google should open-source portions of its infrastructure or offer an API (application programming interface) to its data store that would ease portability to other databases.

Google appears to already be on the case of data portability. On the Google App Engine Blog, software engineer Kevin Gibbs said that one planned feature is large-scale data import and export.

"With Google App Engine, you own all the data in your app. As stated in our terms, you always have the right to get your data out of Google App Engine at any point. We wouldn't have it any other way," Gibbs wrote.

Once again, Google gets tongues a-waggin', even when it isn't the first to a party.

But it's good to see these issues raised and for developers to push for more openness. After all, standards, portability, and interoperability have been good to the Web.

What do you get when you cross Amazon's EC2 on-demand cloud computing infrastructure with Google's new App Exchange foundation for Web applications?

It's hard to say what the union could produce besides ugly children. But it's not just a hypothetical hybrid: programmer Chris Anderson has released software called AppDrop that brings App Exchange to EC2. Programmer Andy Baio spotlighted the development Monday on his blog.

OK, now I need to mention the caveat that this isn't really one cloud computing foundation running inside another.

In fact, Anderson just has the single-computer version of Google's App Engine software running on EC2 rather than the real online one. That means software written with Google's App Engine software developer kit can run on EC2 servers, but it can't take advantage of some of the central features of App Engine. For example, it stores data on that particular server and can't employ Google's BigTable data-storage service to tap into Google's large and load-balanced infrastructure.

Baio quotes Anderson as saying there's room for database improvement, though, including software that could bridge to the more conventional MySQL database software.

"It wouldn't be that hard to write a Python adapter to MySQL that would preserve the BigTable API," or application programming interface, Anderson is quoted as saying. "And while that wouldn't be quite as scalable as BigTable, we've all seen that MySQL can take you pretty far."