I had a great opportunity today to attend a Google "Hackathon" led by a few members of the Google App Engine team. I decided to go after attending a talk by Mano Marks at StartPad on Tuesday. In short, App Engine is a server infrastructure and SDK for building and deploying highly-scalable web applications. The goal is that App Engine apps are easy to build, maintain, and scale, and are cheap to run. App Engine competes with Amazon's EC2, S3, and SimpleDB, as well as lots of more complex solutions. Before Tuesday, I'd read some articles on App Engine and I'd signed up for an account, but I really knew little about it. But, the talk was pretty compelling, so I decided to jump on the opportunity to attend the Hackathon and learn more.
Walking away, I'm convinced that Google is on to something.
Let me set the stage. Google App Engine supplies a Python framework for developing web apps and all development must be in Python. Before this morning, I had never written a line of Python code. I hadn't even read any before Tuesday. App Engine provides the Django framework for web pages. All I knew about Django was its name. Other than the talk I'd been to on Tuesday, I knew nothing about the App Engine SDK. But Mano had certainly made it look easy.
I didn't go in completely unprepared -- I'm not crazy, after all. Last night, I spent an hour and a half reading the first few chapters of of Dive Into Python. I also bought an O'Reilly Python Pocket Reference that I have yet to open. And, I installed the SDK, though I forgot to install Eclipse with PyDev (the preferred editor for Windows), so I had to do that this morning.
I have a little web app I've been meaning to write for a few years, so I thought that would be the perfect thing to try to create in App Engine. I thought maybe I could actually do the whole thing in a day. That turned out to be aiming a little high. I got hung up on stupid Python bugs, some App Engine gotchas that seem obvious now that I know them, and I hadn't counted on the time it took to download, install, and setup Eclipse. If I had already known Python, I think those things wouldn't have bit me and/or I would have worked through them quicker. Maybe I still couldn't have done my whole app in a day, but I would have come a lot closer.
But -- and this is the amazing thing -- I did get the core part working, and I demoed it to the group at the end. My site actually could have gone live. Sure, it's missing some critical features (like keeping track of users) and it's pretty ugly right now, but it worked. Zero to Sixty in Eight hours. Having App Engine team members around to ask questions certainly helped. And the demos at the end showed me just how much some of the people who already knew what they were doing were able to accomplish in just a few hours.
App Engine is not perfect. It's still a work in progress and there are a few silly things. I got JavaScript errors on some admin pages on their live site. And debugging Python this way is a pain. I don't know what the state of the art on Python debuggers is yet, but I'm guessing it's not anywhere near what I'd like to see (my comparison is the Visual Studio debugger, which rocks). And, certainly, it's not appropriate for everything. Services like Sampa can't be built on it. And, it's not going to work if you have very particular database needs. But, it'll work for a lot of things. And it seems the team is interested in listening and it looks like they've already made changes and enhancements in response to feedback.
We've always talked about leveraging existing code, not repeating ourselves, and sticking to our own areas of expertise. And it's always been hard. Google is really delivering a way for us to do just that in a new and exciting way.
If you're interested in finding out when my app goes live, go to www.puzzazz.com and sign up for the mailing list.
0 comments:
Post a Comment