I had a conversation today with David Abramowski, CEO of Morph Labs. We were supposed to talk about how Morph Application Platform, which uses Amazon EC2 and S3 for on-demand cloud computing and storage along with its own routing and provisioning infrastructure, compares with Google App Engine, which uses Google's own cloud infrastructure. That part of the conversation was short, though, because beyond the fact I had a conversation today with David Abramowski, CEO of Morph Labs. We were supposed to talk about how Morph Application Platform, which uses Amazon EC2 and S3 for on-demand cloud computing and storage along with its own routing and provisioning infrastructure, compares with Google App Engine, which uses Google’s own cloud infrastructure. That part of the conversation was short, though, because beyond the fact that they’re both on-demand cloud computing platforms, the two have nothing in common. I was put in mind of Shakespeare sonnet 130, My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.Google App Engine, as I’ve discussed previously, currently supports only Python for an implementation language and BigTable for a (join-less) database, with Django and a simpler Python Web framework developed at Google both on offer to structure a Web application. I can’t yet speak to what deployment is like on Google App Engine, as I signed up too late to get into the beta.Morph currently uses Ruby on Rails as its framework, and PostgreSQL as its database. Today’s announcement at JavaOne was for a beta release of Morph Application Platform for Java, developed in collaboration with Webtide. Abramowski expects the beta to fill up in a couple of days. I was actually more interested in the Ruby version of the Morph Application Platform than the Java beta for my own projects. I’ve signed up for a free developer account. I’ve run into a snag subscribing to the DevCenter service that will let me access an “AppSpace,” but I imagine that will be fixed before long, and I’ll be able to say something about the service first-hand. It almost has to be better than the Rails hosting experience I had at TextDrive, now called Joyent.Meanwhile, two user quotes from the Morph Web site: “Morph is a great service. Deployment is simple. I give them lots of points for ease of deployment. They can help you scale as they are using Amazon’s services on the back end.” – Justin Ball from www.justinball.com “Morph AppSpace is the best experience we’ve ever had for Rails deployment. We can scale to as many app servers as we want in minutes, and then scale back as demand changes. We are also happy about the effortless deployment and the amazing client support. The Morph guys were helpful before, during, and after. From now on, we’ll be using Morph AppSpace in releasing all our new applications.” -Jim James, www.mytripscrapbook.com Software Development