Friday, April 11, 2008

We're up and running!

Google App Engine has been live for several days now and we're thrilled with the response we've gotten so far! We filled our initial batch of accounts within a few hours after Monday night's Campfire One. And today, we've just invited another 10,000 developers to try it out.

We're excited to see the beginnings of a developer community forming in our Google Groups! We're actively reading your posts and responding with help where we can, and it's great to see some of the more experienced members of the community start helping others out too!

We've also seen a lot of feature and bug reports on our Issue Tracker, including requests for Ruby, Java, Perl, PHP, and Fortran. Here are are some of the general areas we're focusing on right now:

  • Support for more languages. We're obviously huge Python fans, but we recognize that there are other great languages out there that developers use to build web applications.
  • Support for offline processing. Right now Google App Engine is great for web apps that do all of their processing in response to user requests, but what about apps that need to perform scheduled tasks or larger-scale data migration? We'd like to support those apps too.
  • Support for large files. Google App Engine currently imposes a limit of 1MB on all requests, both inbound and outbound. We're interested in providing efficient support for much larger uploads and downloads.
  • Billing for additional quota. During the preview release period, all apps are restricted to a set of free resource quotas. Although Google App Engine will always be free to get started, we plan on allowing developers to purchase additional resources in the future, while paying only for what they use.

Judging by the the feedback we've gotten so far, these are areas you're interested in as well--we'll keep you posted. Keep letting us know what you think about the Google App Engine and where you think it should be headed!