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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.

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."

It's just like an unformatted hard drive, Amazon.com Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels explained. The difference is that it's in the "cloud" somewhere and you get to it through an API.

Amazon Web Services executives on Sunday described a forthcoming persistent storage feature, called EC2 Persistent Storage, which they say will make its hosted computing services more flexible and far more reliable.

People can sign up for an early beta test program now before Amazon opens it up for a wider release later this year.

The service works with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) hosted server offering. It allows developers to set aside a storage volume online, on which people save files in different file systems. This differs from what is available now with EC2 because once a compute instance is taken offline, the data associated with it goes away.

With a persistent storage service, data can remain linked to a specific computing instance. Significantly, people can take a snapshot of that data and store it on Amazon's S3 storage service. That effectively acts as a way to create a back-up of their computing operation on the "cloud," according to Amazon executives.

"The snapshot is extremely powerful technology and allows for building highly fault-tolerant applications operating worldwide. Combine these snapshots with Availability Zones and Elastic IPs and you have all the tools to manage and migrate even the most complex of applications," Vogels wrote on his blog.

"And the great thing is it that it is all done with using standard technologies such that you can use this with any kind of application, middleware or any infrastructure software, whether it is legacy or brand new," he added.

Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr also describes the service on his blog, saying it was one of the most requested features from developers.

Thorsten vok Eiken at RightScale, who has been testing the service, talks about the implications of this feature and says his company is making tools to make it easier to use these services.

Von Eiken says that persistent storage is a dramatically important feature that will lead many more companies and developers to hosted development platforms.

"It's going to be like agile software development: if you want to survive as an Internet/Web service you will have to compute in the cloud or your competitors will leave you in the dust by being able to deploy faster, better, and cheaper," he said.

A couple of weeks back, Amazon.com announced an expansion of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. The still-in-beta EC2 is a twist on the much-discussed, if rarely seen in the wild, compute utility whereby customers rent computing by virtual machine (VM)-hour; Amazon's EC2 infrastructure is based on a Xen hypervisor structure rather than running directly on physical hardware.

One implication of Amazon using VMs is that they can easily offer a variety of different VM sizes up to the size of the physical hardware. That was the most recent change announced. In addition to the default "Small Instance," users can now get "Large Instances" or "Extra Large Instances." These might be useful if, for example, you need to pair a heavyweight database instance with some lightweight Web services.

Another implication is that VM images, called Amazon Machine Images (AMI) in this case, can be archived and transported. This is analogous to VMware's virtual appliances. Amazon itself hasn't done much to jump-start an image marketplace at this point as VMware has. However, it does provide a mechanism for customers to post and publicly share AMIs and sees the opportunity for people to offer paid AMIs over time.

I bring this up because Emre Sokullo over at Read/Write Web has a post and table that does a great job of crystallizing why getting into Web services is such a big deal for Amazon. In short, Amazon's revenue is comparable to Google's. The difference is that, while Google is operating at a 29 percent profit margin, Amazon is under 2 percent. Which is probably about the best one can hope for with a big "mail order" retail operation.