Google "Hello, World" App Up in Less Than an Hour

Tieg Zaharia — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 06:53:00 +0000

The News

I saw the news today about Google parting the clouds and letting us take a look at the big server in the sky today. I signed up for one of the 10,000 developer accounts, was told I was added to the waitlist, and then got an email saying I was accepted.

The Investigation

And here are some things I’ve gathered:

They have their own version of SQL called GQL
Python is the only language they support right now, which is mentioned a few places in the docs (they also throw Django links around a lot)
You need to have Python 2.5 installed, and then you can use one of their SDK installers to set their environment up on your machine.
There are two py scripts they provide: “dev_appserver.py” for you to run a development server, and “appcfg.py” for automatically deploying your app (I still love you, Capistrano).
They have a library for signing in Google users (it has a dummy development version to test on– this one worked for me in development, but didn’t seem to work in production)
The apps are hosted on their domain appspot.com (I’m not sure about DNS servers yet)

The Result

I tried to remember what I knew about Python and took their “Hello, World” tutorial (with a few modifications to make it a simple movie database), and within less than an hour had this guy running:

http://flikfest.appspot.com

Here’s a screenshot of the admin interface you’re given (similar to Analytics):

They make it pretty much dead-easy to deploy. Makes you wonder what’s going to happen down the road. Hopefully Ruby support, and then someone will proably write the necessary adapters for GQL? How much are they eventually going to charge for this thing?

border: solid 1px red;: Google "Hello, World" App Up in Less Than an Hour

Google "Hello, World" App Up in Less Than an Hour

The News

The Investigation

The Result