AppEngine

I can't imagine what it's like wafting to Berkeley to study something vaguely scientific. Though I do know a couple of people who went there and they have very peculiar personalities and certain troubles with dating.

I mention this because of the extraordinary ingenuity and possible slight strangeness of freshman Derek Low. He clearly isn't being sufficiently challenged by his curriculum. So he thought he'd see how much he could automate his dorm room.

He uploaded the results of his travails to YouTube and they make for quite mesmerizing viewing.

I am grateful to TechCrunch for … Read more

If you want to have a say in the design of Go, Google's lower-level programming language, you'd better act fast.

That's because Google plans to finalize the language in coming months and bake it into its Google App Engine service. The company released Go along with programming tools and other open-source assets almost exactly two years ago.

"The plan is to launch Go 1 in early 2012. We hope to bring the Go App Engine runtime out of 'experimental' status at the same time," said Andrew Gerrand, Google's Go developer advocate, in a blog post … Read more

Nice financial results notwithstanding, Google had some trouble late today with its App Engine service for online applications.

Overall availability of the cloud-computing foundation, which can run online applications written in Python or Java, dropped at least as low as 88.1 percent, according to the Google App Engine status dashboard.

The dashboard showed problems serving Java programs--more than half of attempts to request an app's Web page resources produced errors at one point. There also were delays in using a programming interface to manage tasks.

In Google's postmortem analysis, the company determined that there was an overall … Read more

Go, Google's experimental programming language, is coming to the company's App Engine cloud-computing service--and a bit closer to reality in the process.

Google hopes to use Go to tackle modern programming challenges such as getting useful work out of chips with multiple processor cores. Getting new languages to catch on is difficult, though--it took Sun Microsystems years with Java, and its Fortress never really caught on widely.

But incorporating Go into App Engine could help make it more relevant, or at least easier to test out, by reducing the hassles involved in trying it. App Engine is a … Read more

Google updated its AppEngine cloud platform earlier this week with new features and functions that help to address some of the services initial shortcomings.

According to a blog post from the AppEngine development team, new features include multitenancy support (to run multiple instances of an application), high-performance image serving, and increased data storage quotas.

Multitenancy is accomplished via the new Namespaces API, which allows multiple organizations to run the same application, segregating data using a unique namespace for each client. This allows developers to serve the same app to multiple different customers, with each customer seeing their own unique copy … Read more

With all of the talk about Android, the open Web, and video taking place at this week's Google I/O conference, big software vendors could have easily been lulled into underestimating how much Google is actually targeting enterprises with new and updated offerings.

That would be a mistake.

Google has become such a prolific creator of technology that suits its own business needs, somewhere down the line it crossed over into the future of the enterprise, or at least a version of the future--one that develops software to consume and manage IT services and resources without having to build … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Google's pitch for the enterprise continued Wednesday at Google I/O, as the search giant attempted to make the case that businesses should be considering Web-based technologies for their own applications--not just Google's.

Day One of the Google I/O show was a disappointment to anyone looking for news about Google's Android mobile operating system or reported "Google TV" platform. But those who were in San Francisco's Moscone Center for more information about how they can incorporate HTML5 technologies into their own application-development practices got an earful.

"The Web is ready for … Read more

If recent research is any indication, Amazon.com and Google are winning the cloud game.

Evans Data on Tuesday released a report (registration required) on how developers perceive cloud service providers related to cloud services offerings, including their completeness and the companies' ability to execute on the vision.

Janel Garvin, the founder of Evans Data and the author of the report, provides excellent insight into the current state of the market and how quickly things could change, if certain large vendors (notably AT&T and Microsoft) got their acts together more quickly.

Given their robust services, it isn't surprising that Amazon and Google top the list. And although IBM, VMware, and Microsoft trail, each offers important components of cloud infrastructure. … Read more

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 … Read more