Cory Comer’s Blog

So yesterday I got a gander at the new Google App Engine that was announced at the most recent Campfire One event.

I must say I am thoroughly impressed!

Google has always had the mindset of keeping technical hurdles low for developers to incite more creativity and actual development time. Whether your programming language of choice is Python, PHP, Java, C++, .NET, or any of the other biggys these days, you have no doubt felt the pain and heart ache of setting up your development platform, deployment services, and production environment.  There’s always an array of services that need to work in harmony with one another that tend to fight tooth and nail against you at times.

Google’s new App Engine could put the pain and suffering of many a web developer to pasture.

Right now the only supported language is Python. I suspect though in a future release Google will (hopefully) expand that to include languages like JavaScript, Java, Ruby, possibly PHP and a few others.

I have to keep reminding myself that this is a preview release as well. I keep wanting to criticize the lack of support for sockets and threading in Python. Especially considering those particular features of the language are what primarily attracted me in the first place as a PHP developer.

Will Google App Engine replace the age old standardized web application stack? Will we see Apache and Lighttpd’s market share drop from the emergence of a one-stop-shop application engine?

Part of me wants to see that happen, knowing that a lower barrier to entry for web applications is what it’s going to take to continue to dissolve the foothold platform development has had in enterprise development for so long. But part of me is old and stubborn and is hording my LAMP stack like a recently released inmate guarding his dinner plate.

Change is good though, and I can’t wait to see what Google App Engine is capable of with a mature release candidate.

Just promise to be gentle.

So I was browsing through a few blogs yesterday and I came across a post by John Herren about Yahoo Pipes.

I vaguely remember hearing about this service when it first launched but originally dismissed it as being another attempt at jumping on the services band wagon.

How wrong I was!

Taking a look over at the Yahoo Pipes site you can watch a video demonstrating how to build a Pipe and some of the functionality of the very robust Yahoo Pipes editor.

First and foremost I have to hand it to Yahoo for the work they have done on the editor itself. Usually when you run across a web application that utilizes this much JavaScript you run into sluggish response and an overall sub-par user experience. This is far from the case with the Pipes editor.

Beyond the usability of the editor, I was very impressed with the array of options the editor gives you. There’s a lot of different input sources offered by the editor allowing you to pull data into your Pipe from various remote locations and perform an array of operations on the data.

Consuming your Pipes is incredibly easy now with PHP thanks in part to John Herren for making some noise on a better delivery method for PHP applications, and entirely to the Yahoo Pipes development team, who in about three days time implemented serialized PHP output for Yahoo Pipes.

This is one service that really deserves some attention. My hat goes off to the entire Yahoo Pipes development team for all of your efforts and incredibly innovative thinking.