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The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet.
The jobs for which App Engine will really shine are the ones for which lock-in is not really an issue. I’ve spent some time in the bottom-of-the-barrel web consulting trenches. As a HTML/PHP monkey for local coffee shops, you can burn up a lot of (mostly unpaid) time fixing little crap that would never come up on App Engine. When your host screws with their Apache conf and you have to change a global variable somewhere, 6 months after you considered the project done, there’s only so many free lattes you can drink before your head explodes. With App Engine, the promise is, that will never happen again.
Assuming the whole thing bootstraps like it should, we’ll soon see Drupal and shopping carts and blog engines all running in the App Engine container. We’ll also see people fork AppDrop’s code to make it more stable and scalable, and perhaps charge a modest fee for hosting it (sites like Dreamhost will include it in existing packages). The idea that they’d have to invest engineering time in writing a Big Table clone is ludicrous. The applications in this sweet spot don’t need high scalability. Backing the datastore API with MySQL would more than serve the needs for this constituency, slotting smoothly into existing infrastructure.
The App Engine sweet spot is a lot closer to GeoCities than to Joyent. It’s defining characteristic is fire-and-forget, with standardization as a close second. When clients need to add features to an existing application, bringing a new developer up to speed will be even easier than on a Rails project. Sheesh, it took me 2 hours to write and deploy my first App Engine app, and I spent half that time learning Python.
There are two senses in which one can understand the question, “Will it scale?”: In the technical sense Google has convinced us that their implementation can handle high traffic loads (if you are willing to pay). In the social sense, the sense in which crappy-but-simple often scales (examples being PHP, AK-47s, and $30 cellphones), I hope AppDrop has made the point that standardized App Engine compatible containers can also scale.
But just because the sweet spot is local coffee shops and flash games written by high-schoolers, doesn’t mean clever developers can’t make App Engine a part of their toolkit for more ambitious projects. More on that in a later post.
3 comments on The App Engine Sweet Spot
the css source code needs urgent work at appdrop.com to unwrap google ads from margining out the entire
href=”/stylesheets/app.css” media=”screen” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css google_ad_width = 120can’t read the outside left right margins on the homepage of appdrop.com using XP laptop because wordwrap from google adsense overlaps the
text.Hey, you got a mention in Google’s blog :) http://feeds.feedburner.com/r/blogspot/Dcni/3/273104011/code-review-start-your-app-engine-and.html