What is Google App Engine?

[Paramount]

This is gonna sound like a stupid question, but I can't quite get my head round it. I think I just need it in noobs terms.

Is it basically just a scalable webserver? Why would I use it over just grabbing some hosting space from tsohost or similar?

 

[daz]

It is scalable, but you can only use Google's technologies - that means no PHP and no MySQL.

I think they use either Ruby or Python with something called BigTable for database. This means that if you want to run a blog or a forum on the platform, you'd have to write it from scratch using those technologies rather than installing Wordpress or PHPBB.

 

[HumbleCoder]

It is scalable, but you can only use Google's technologies - that means no PHP and no MySQL.

I think they use either Ruby or Python with something called BigTable for database. This means that if you want to run a blog or a forum on the platform, you'd have to write it from scratch using those technologies rather than installing Wordpress or PHPBB.

Your choice is Python or Java

 

[daz]

I'm sure the platform is useful for some people but it's quite restrictive so I can only imagine it being a very niche product at the moment. I would imagine lots of people sign-up and play around but don't actually do very much with the service.

 

[Dj_Jestar]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_App_Engine

 

[HumbleCoder]

I'm sure the platform is useful for some people but it's quite restrictive so I can only imagine it being a very niche product at the moment. I would imagine lots of people sign-up and play around but don't actually do very much with the service.

The last bit sums up what I did, I looked to create a web app in Python played with GAE didn't like it then went off got a Linode and wrote my app using Pylons.

Plus if you Google around there is a lot of discontent about it exceptioning out over resource use and Google are slow to respond to tickets about it.