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The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.
I managed to swing an AppEngine account on the first day, and build an app and everything. The hardest part was deciding what to build. For that I asked my lovely wife Amy and after talking about it we decided that the best thing for the world would be more snarky comments about celebrities. You’ve heard of Go Fug Yourself – now everyone can get in on the action with Fug This!
The application is simple. Just a bookmarklet to post new Fugs into the system, and a page to display the fugs. We’ll probably add RSS feeds and user pages once I learn Python. :)
If you want to see how simple it really is (one python file, a yaml configuration file, and a template) I’ve released the whole thing on GitHub—if anyone wants to add pagination, that’d be sweet!
About the only complicated bit in the whole application is storing blobs of photos in the database (and that was in part due to an inconsistency between Google’s Python implementation and the one on my Mac).
I can see AppEngine really taking off, once Google starts supporting real programming languages (like Javascript) in their runtime. You can’t run background tasks in AppEngine. But who cares?—If you are doing a web-crawl or RSS feeds or something where you have serious software and data, you’d be stupid to give it to Google anyway. But for lightning fast page serving and no-hassle scalability, AppEngine is the way to go.
I can easily see building the next generation of Grabb.it as an EC2-based web crawling MapReducer, with its client front-side hosted on AppEngine.
It was so easy I forgot it was Python. :)
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