Webware

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.

Bungee Labs is extending the hosting options for its Web application development environment, Bungee Connect. Today, developers using the Bungee Connect development environment can host their applications on Bungee's multitenant grid in the U.S. and Europe or on Amazon EC2. Beginning in July in public beta, organizations will be able to deploy Bungee Connect applications via the new Bungee Application Server on their own hosting infrastructure.

Bungee Labs, along with Coghead, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Joyent, Mosso, salesforce.com, NetSuite, Microsoft and others, is paving the way to platforms-as-a-service--hosted infrastructure for developing and delivering Web applications.

Bungee Labs charges fees based on production deployment of Bungee-powered applications. The billing rate for Bungee Labs' Grid or Amazon EC2 is $0.06 per user-session-hour rounded to the nearest second-per-user-session. For the public beta, no fees will be charged. The Bungee Application Server (with a VMware-based software appliance for managing and deploying applications across servers) for self-hosting applications starts at $500 per server, per month.

The Bungee Application Server will also be available community source licenses, and the company is considering FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) licenses.

See also: Bungee Labs mashing up old-school CRM with new-school Web 2.0

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.

I'm always on the lookout for simple ways to manage video on the Web. One of them, called Mux has been getting some buzz lately for taking advantage of both Amazon's EC2 and S3 Web services to store data and do the crunching at the same time. Mux uses the two services together to serves as a video ripper and converter, letting you grab videos off a small handful of popular sites and save them locally or send them to your mobile phone. It'll also take any file on your computer and convert it without the need for software or CPU cycles.

Crunch files on someone else's servers with Mux.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Apple's iPhone users also get a treat, as Mux is setup to convert Flash videos on the fly to make them playable on the device. The only caveat is that you have to enter the URL in the mobile application, which would be a whole heck of a lot easier if the iPhone had a way to copy and paste. I tried it out on a few videos from around the Web and had mixed results. A surprising amount of video sites have done as much as possible to support mobile phones without Flash, including CollegeHumor, Break, and Dailymotion. However, those that don't work without Flash on cell phones, such as Vimeo and MySpace, simply crashed the converter.

Another reason Mux is useful is for the folks who don't want to have to plug in their phones to a computer to sync their media. You can simply send entire Web clips over to your phone using SMS. As long as you've got a data plan you can access the link anytime you want to watch or download the full video. It's very handy.

Mux was created by the same team who did Cruxy, a media distributing service that debuted at the Under the Radar Media conference last summer.

See also: ZamZar and iDesktop.tv

Update 2:20 p.m. PST: I added some more details and a reaction.

Amazon.com has begun publicly testing a third element to its online computing services: a database capability called SimpleDB.

The new Web service joins two others the online retailer launched in 2006 that anyone can pay to use: computing horsepower called the Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and data storage called Simple Storage Service (S3). SimpleDB works in conjunction with those services, letting customers store, modify, and query data, the company said Friday.

"Amazon SimpleDB provides quick, efficient storage and retrieval of your data to support high performance Web applications," the company said on its SimpleDB Web site. "Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database--real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data--without the operational complexity."

The service costs 14 cents per hour per for each SimpleDB machine, plus a data transfer fee. Transferring data into the database costs 10 cents per gigabyte, while transferring it out costs 18 cents per gigabyte for the first 10 terabyte transferred per month, 16 cents for the next 40 terabytes transferred per month, and 13 cents per gigabyte per month after that.

The service is in limited beta, with customers able to sign up on a first-come, first-served basis, Amazon.com said.

Amazon declined to say what software underlies the service. "We don't talk about the internal software, but I can tell you that we use many different technologies with the criteria that they have to be massively scalable and highly reliable," spokeswoman Kay Kinton said.

The online retailer has been expanding its online services of late. It's also begun beta testing another service running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on EC2.

Amazon cloud-computing customer include blog-hosting site Wordpress and photo-sharing site SmugMug.

SmugMug CEO Chris MacAskill gave the technology a qualified thumb-sup in a blog posting Friday. "SimpleDB should be screaming fast, incredibly scalable, and almost all of our SQL (database) queries would work with no changes other than syntax. Like many of you, I'm sure, we're using much of our RDBMS (relational database management software) as a fairly simple data store and aren't using many advanced RDBMS capabilities." One problem, though, is waiting for Amazon's remote database to a request from a local server.

For some more technical details, the Inside Looking Out blog has some, and Amazon has a SimpleDB developer guide.

Update: I added a lot more detail about Red Hat's ambitions and other moves.

Red Hat on Wednesday announced a significant departure from its current business plan, saying its flagship Linux product will be available on Amazon.com's Elastic Computing Cloud online service.

Previously, the Raleigh, N.C.-based company only sold its Red Hat Enterprise Linux product in the form of a support contract costing between $349 and $2,499 per year. But in a beta program beginning in the fourth quarter, the software will be available on Amazon's EC2 infrastructure, Red Hat said.

The move also signals a new phase in EC2. By using RHEL, a supported product for which numerous applications are certified, the online service looks more like a variation of an existing, established software product and less like a radical departure from how computing is typically performed today.

Currently, EC2, still in beta, is effectively a blank slate on which customers install and manage their own software.

The Amazon partnership was among a host of Red Hat announcements. In addition, the company upgraded its RHEL to version 5.1, including new virtualization abilities with Xen 3.1, announced an upcoming RHEL version geared for use embedded as a foundation for software companies' products, and declared an ambitious goal to conquer half the server market.

"We will more than double our market share to power more than 50 percent of the world's servers by 2015," said Paul Cormier, Red Hat's executive vice president for worldwide engineering. Part of that ambition will be supported by the promise that software partners won't have to recertify their software for the various RHEL versions--those running on regular servers, on EC2, or on the virtualization foundations from Red Hat, VMware, and Microsoft, Cormier added.

Pricing for the Red Hat EC2 option is variable--a classic example of the "pay as you go" philosophy that some prefer, because it ties expenses to actual use, though it can be less predictable. The service will cost $19 per month plus 21, 53, or 94 cents per hour, depending on computing and storage capacity, plus 11 cents per gigabyte transferred in and 19 cents per gigabyte transferred out.

Each computer being rented is actually a virtual machine, a slice of a physical server that's running several using virtualization software. The "small" RHEL instance offers 1.7GB of memory, 160GB of storage, and Amazon's virtual equivalent of one 32-bit processor core; "medium" bumps that to 7.5GB of memory, 850GB of storage, and two 64-bit cores; and "large" provides 15GB of memory, 1690GB of storage, and 4 64-bit cores.

Customers also can get more storage through use of Amazon's S3 storage service, which costs extra. "While the use of S3 is not mandatory for maintaining a working Red Hat Enterprise Linux cloud server, Red Hat recommends all customers manage their servers and maintain configurations within Amazon's S3 storage infrastructure," Red Hat said in a statement.

New Red Hat horizons
EC2 is just one new horizon Red Hat hopes to call its own turf. Another is the core business of VMware, the market leader for virtualization. The reason: the new version of RHEL comes with Xen 3.1, a significantly more mature virtualization foundation than the version that debuted with RHEL 5.0 earlier this year.

The new version, for example, enables "live migration," which lets software running in a virtual machine be moved, while running, from one physical computer to another. And with 3.1, Red Hat also is offering support for running Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003 and, when it ships, Server 2008.

"Customers can save $20,000 to $30,000 in licensing fees" compared with VMware, said Scott Crenshaw, vice president of Red Hat's enterprise Linux business. And now, many higher-end features available with VMware's Virtual Infrastructure product are free with RHEL: "High availability, clustering, failover, live migration, storage virtualization all are integrated into the core infrastructure," he said.

VMware has a major lead in the marketplace, not to mention more revenue and faster growth than Red Hat. The EMC subsidiary offers not just the basic virtualization but also many higher-level services: its own version of live migration, called VMotion; high availability to move or restart ailing virtual machines; and resource monitoring to ensure virtual machines don't max out their hardware or let idle servers be shut down.

Red Hat, in comparison, is just getting started with virtualization, though Crenshaw said the company is pleased with the accelerating pace of adoption. Customers are using Xen on 18,000 servers, he boasted. One is DreamWorks Animation, which endorsed the technology Wednesday.

Red Hat is cheaper, though, and customers don't have to worry about using two different management interfaces for controlling their servers, the company argued.

Virtual appliances
Virtualization has enabled a new form of software sales: virtual "appliances" that bundle software with an underlying operating system for quick installation on a virtual machine. VMware has been an aggressive evangelist of the approach, and now Red Hat is becoming more directly involved.

The company will offer a version of RHEL called the Red Hat Appliance Operating System in the first half of 2008 that software companies can use to build appliances, along with a software development kit to help build them, said Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens.

The software companies themselves, which act in effect as RHEL resellers, will support the software for customers, but Red Hat will backstop the software companies with level-three support, Cormier said. The software companies will pay Red Hat, probably through a subscription model, that will include access to the Red Hat Network so customer software can be updated, Red Hat said.

The divide between Web IM apps and the software versions is getting smaller, albeit with the help of improved bandwidth and technology like Adobe's Flash. In the same vein, Meebo, the popular Web-based multiclient chat platform is getting a handy update tonight. Users are now able to trade files with each other right in the chat window. It's not just Meebo users, either, it's anyone on your friends list. If your buddy has a file-transfer-enabled client, you'll be able to pass files back and forth freely.

However, unlike software IM clients, the caps for file transfer are very stringent at 10MB per file, and 30MB of total transfers per month, meaning you're not going to be able to pass around video clips or other large files, especially to more than one or two buddies, before hitting your limit.

The Meebo team has employed a combination of Amazon's Web Services to make the transferring possible, including EC2 for scaling and S3 for storage. Safari and Opera users are out of luck, however; the Meebo team has only got it working for Internet Explorer and Firefox. Safari support is on the way "soon." In the meantime, the upgrade is good for casual and occasional file swapping, but with these limits you're better off sticking to e-mail attachments or a quick-and-dirty file-drop-and-share service like Divshare.

Previous Meebo Coverage:
Meebo relaunches improved iPhone chat app
Meebo now works on the iPhone (kinda)
Meebo launching media-enabled chat rooms
Meebo releases supersimple site chat

Send (small) files to your friends sans software with Meebo. You'll notice a new 'send file' button in your chat windows starting tonight.

(Credit: Meebo.com / CNET Networks)