I made a teensy-weensy mistake when I started to look at Google App Engine: I downloaded and installed the SDK and read through the Getting Started Guide fairly thoroughly before signing up for an account. As a result, I've been wait-listed. I think that means that more than 10,000 others have already signed up for the free App Engine beta. Oh well, I can still develop locally until my invitation comes through. I made a teensy-weensy mistake when I started to look at Google App Engine: I downloaded and installed the SDK and read through the Getting Started Guide fairly thoroughly before signing up for an account. As a result, I’ve been wait-listed. I think that means that more than 10,000 others have already signed up for the free App Engine beta. Oh well, I can still develop locally until my invitation comes through.As about a million other bloggers have already discussed, Google App Engine feels like a direct competitor to Amazon’s three Web services (EC2, SimpleDB and S3) all rolled into one Python framework. I think it would be really nice to be able to target the Google infrastructure “cloud” for a Web application at need, just as it’s really nice to be able to target the Amazon infrastructure and the SalesForce.com infrastructure at need. I can see different uses for the various platforms as currently constituted; I can also see why the choice might confuse people. I like the choice of Python as the first implementation language, unlike many other bloggers who seem to be whining about the lack of Ruby and PHP support. I also like the way Google has given us a local server for development, and given us access to most of Django (a Web-development framework), WebOb (which provides objects for HTTP requests and responses), and PyYAML (a parser) as well as most of the standard Python runtime libraries. I think I can learn GQL without a problem: it’s basically a subset of SQL.I’ll pass over the way the HuddleChat demo ripped off the 37Signals Campfire real-time chat application, for two reasons. First, about half a million other bloggers have already complained about it; second, Google has already bowed to the pressure and pulled the app.I wonder what the 10,000 others who have already signed up for the free App Engine beta are going to do with it. In fact, I wonder what I’ll do with it when I eventually get access. What’s a potentially profitable Web server application that needs great scalability, doesn’t need table joins, and hasn’t already been done to death? Software Development