WebProNews » App Engine

Google Utilized to “Make History” for 9/11 Remembrance

Chris Crum — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:50:10 +0000

Google has been criticized by some in the past for not featuring 9/11 doodles on the home page on the anniversary of the attacks on September 11th. Google is, however, pointing to a site from the company’s official blog, that invites people to "share their experiences of 9/11 and its aftermath in an effort to preserve the memories of that time."

The site is called Make History, and utilizes Google Maps Street View and Google’s App Engine. People can submit their photos/videos of the site of the World Trade Center attacks, the Pentagon, and the site of the Flight 93 crash, as well as their stories.

The site was created by the National September 11th Memorial & Museum in partnership with design firm Local Projects.

Bing and Ask both have up 9/11 memorial images, and there is an iPhone app called 9/11 Numbers (via RWW).

Doug Caverly of WebProNews, who also writes regularly for the NYC Tower site, has a new piece up today. Read that here.

Google Talks HTML 5 and Innovation

Chris Crum — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:40:04 +0000

On Wednesday, Google held its Annual Developer Conference, which this year dealt a lot with the acceleration of the open web platform. There was a specific focus on HTML 5, which Google says is enabling developers to build uniquely powerful web apps.

Google announced the following new products at the conference:

- Google Web Elements
- Java Language Support for App Engine
- Android Developer Challenge 2

Google Web Elements is described as "an easy way to incorporate Google products onto a website or blog." This includes Maps, News, and YouTube videos, as well as Google Friend Connect comment functionality.

The general availability of Java language support in App Engine provides developers with an end-to-end Java language solution for building AJAX web apps. Over 80,000 web apps have been built on App Engine since its launch just over a year ago.

The Android Developer Challenge 2 is a Google-funded initiative to reward developers for building innovative and useful apps for Android. The winner gets up to a quarter million dollars. The winner will be announced in November.

"Bet on the web," said Vic Gundotra, VP of Developer Products at Google. "Its rate of innovation has dramatically accelerated over the past 12 months, giving rise to an open web platform that’s fundamentally more capable and more sophisticated than even a year ago. The combination of HTML 5, a vibrant developer community, and the pervasiveness of modern web browsers is delivering a programming model and an end-user experience that will surprise and delight people."

The web is clearly getting more interesting and innovative by the day. Google is often a catalyst to this. It will be interesting to see what kind of apps have come out between this conference and next year’s.

Google Set To Launch App Engine API

Mike Sachoff — Wed, 28 May 2008 14:27:36 +0000

Google has introduced its Google App Engine API along with new services for developers.

The Google App Engine allows developers to create their web applications based on the engine and operate them through Google, which host the applications and offers storage. The company will launch the service on May 29 at its I/0 developer conference in San Francisco. The App Engine program was initially open to a group of 10,000 developers.

Google also announced what it will cost for developers to use the service. Accounts will have a free storage quota of 500MB and five million page views per month. Later this year developers will pay 10 to 12 cents per CPU core-hour, 15 to 18 cents per GB-month of storage, 11 to 13 cents per GB outgoing bandwidth, and 9 to 11 cents per GB incoming bandwidth.

"After years of competition among platforms, the web has won because it’s open, because it’s ubiquitous, and because there’s a passionate community working together to move it forward," said Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering for developer products at Google.

"Openness is great for developers and for users because it knocks down hurdles to building great applications, and because it speeds the next wave of innovation by letting good ideas be shared. The web doesn’t depend on any one API or tool or product, from Google or anyone else," said Gundotra.

Google Revs Up App Engine

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:56:39 +0000

Google opened App Engine for hosting and scaling web applications to an early preview group of 10,000, first come first serve, developers.

The arrival of App Engine happened during one of Google’s coding events, Campfire One. App Engine presents Google’s infrastructure to web application developers, with the heavy features Google uses to help people quickly find information in search.

App Engine’s blog highlighted some of the mouth-watering features the initial group of accepted developers will get to play with on launch:

Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions) Automatic scaling and load balancing Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email Fully featured local development environment

“During this preview period, applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day,” Google said. “We expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million pageviews per month.”

To give that some perspective, Matt Cutts put it in context, offering his blog’s performance as a benchmark:

I checked out my pageview stats for the first three months of the year. If you subtract out a couple posts that got hit by digg, I