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Mastering The Complex SaleTechnology news and Jobs 
The Linux distillery Google closed source app engine does evil
The Linux distillery Google closed source app engine does evil | Google closed source app engine does evil |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Wednesday, 16 April 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 3 Indeed, anyone who has thought they could cash in on the cult of Facebook soon discovers Facebook won’t host your application. They’ll provide APIs and tools but you need your own web space. The free web area generally provided by residential ISPs could do the job but, hey, if you’re wanting to code for Facebook you have to think big and prepare for hits in the tens, nay hundreds of thousands. The millions even, as 20 friends spam invite 20 friends. Your free ISP web space will block visitors after so many and in this rapidly wired world nothing spells death by humiliation more than having your social web app show up as broken. Instead you can now use Google’s App Engine which exists solely to serve apps from reliable servers that will eat up heavy loads. You get a free domain name under appspot.com or you can use your own domain. You get 500MB of storage along with plenty of CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views per month. That’s huge. At the moment, only the Python programming language, version 2.5.2, is supported. There’s no PHP or .NET to be found here, although Google say more languages may be available in the future. In addition, and sanely – Google have to protect their equipment – the apps run in a protected sandbox environment which restricts access to the underlying operating system and hardware. One example is that files can’t be created in code. You can read files, but only those uploaded with the app. Any storage requirements have to be met through the provided data store. Additionally, no background processes are allowed; all code must execute solely in response to a web request and must return a web-based response. After the response has been sent there cannot be any further processing until the next request is received. APIs have been provided to work with the data store, Google accounts, e-mail services and some other items. You’ll need to download Python and the software development kit (SDK), which is available for download for Windows, MacOS and Linux. Disappointingly, and acting as a bad advertisement for the strength of Google’s equipment, my first attempts to download the SDK met with a 502 server error, reporting “The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds.” I have to be fair: Google have at this time restricted the SDK to 10,000 developers. It's possible the failure was because that number has been exceeded. However, if this is the case I'd have preferred a message like "Sorry, the number of downloads has now been reached" rather than an error page. All sounds good so far? Please do read on. CONTINUED |
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