Google Apps Engine and it's Web 2.5 significance

Last week, during the Singapore PHP User Group, the developers from Ruby, PHP and Python groups were brimmed with excitement of a news from Google. The  story is that Google has launched a preview release of the Google App Engine.  Of course, the news and blogs are littered with comments on the significance of this new move. It also further boosts the idea of the web as a platform paradigm (some have coined this as web 2.5).  The idea of a platform-as-a-service providers is to allow developers in creating and distributing Web applications via the cloud and for users to consume them on any digital device (that can connect quickly to the web), anytime and anywhere. Google has been late on this, given that Facebook (and other social networks such as Friendster) and Apple (with the iPhone) have already started moving into the space quickly. How will this impact the developers and consumers out there?

• Jumpstarting another long tail: With the release of the apps engine, many developers will rush to develop apps to be distributed on the Google platform. The key is that in the short time, there will be few applications going up, given that the current support is for Python programmers. Soon, this integrated platform will open up to developers of Ruby and PHP. A fully integrated development platform can provide the developers a quicker way in distributing their apps and spread the word out there. Still, the web is a wild wild west, and it is likely that the behaviour of apps distribution would follow something along the lines of Facebook. There will be people cloning apps and there will be intense competition to create a better marketplace for consumers of web service who, at the same time, contribute their own data into the space.
• Blogspot is for bloggers and Apps Engine is for developers: This is another move to democratize the web quicker. A few years back, blogs empowered the people to speak up and promote their own human voice about their thoughts and opinions on different issues from lifestyle to technology to politics. Similarly, we see people being empowered now to create podcasts and videocasts with tools that are simple to use. The best developers will have no problem utilizing the advantages of the Google platform. What we are seeing in this new engine is to level up or making it easier for developers (who might be teenagers and have no money to get their apps hosted) that might need some help in getting the word out. The not-so-expert or rich developers can fully utilize the features of dynamic web serving, disk space (0.5 GB) automatic scaling and load balancing in the Google engine (which are issues when they first started out)  such that they only concentrate on making the apps better.

The SDK is now available for download and the following video will give you some idea on how this whole apps engine would develop a virtuous cycle for developers:

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