Announcing AppDrop.com (host Google App Engine projects on EC2)
With Google's release of App Engine, we felt the opportunity landscape of the web shift a little under our feet. With the advent of true fire-and-forget dynamic websites, the kinds of projects that will be economical to try has expanded enormously. Truly, just throw it against the wall and see if it sticks. And if it takes a year or two to start making money, no worries. You'll have created 20 other apps in the meantime.
I heard grumblings about lock in on the one hand, and pronouncements of web-Hypercard on the other, and figured that writing an argument pushing back against the lock in question would not be half as effective as doing something.
Host your App Engine applications on my new site, AppDrop.com, it's lotsa fun, and pretty much works. I didn't build it to scale, or for extra security - but it is open source, so if you are up for it, there are links to the GitHub projects from the App Drop homepage. It should be relatively straightforward to build your own App Engine host. It looks like applanding.com is still available...
I don't think Amazon has anything to worry about here. The slice of the pie that needs to run 25-machine Hadoop jobs is getting bigger all the time. Until Google provides open access to their real compute cluster, I don't see a threat to that. As I said in my last post, I could see porting the user side of Grabb.it to AppSpot (or AppDrop) and using the urlfetch api to keep the storage in CouchDB on EC2 (where I can manage a web-scale spider). Hey, aren't we supposed to keep our user data seperate from our application data? This might be a way to get cheaper, lower-latency HTML serving, without any real lock-in.
h2. What did I learn?
- Python (never touched it before). It's not that bad despite all the type ceremonies.
- God has your back. I don't know why I wasn't using this before. Sure beats the pants off mongrel_cluster.
- The Google Auth APIs. I didn't clone them exactly, but I think I captured the spirit (and the purpose of them) and that's the best way to learn.
by oli, 2008/04/14 20:55:18 +0000
App Landing is a nice name :-)
by Arto Bendiken, 2008/04/14 21:04:28 +0000
A perfect case example of code talks, bullshit walks. Well done!
by Cute Leonie, 2008/04/15 00:32:14 +0000
What a wonderful hack. I like the idea of using goolges free stuff on amazon in addition to their existing tools.
Thank you for the great work !
by Charlie, 2008/04/15 09:36:21 +0000
Chris, Not to minimize what you've done, because I share the 'implementation talks' mindset, but I don't think it's a stretch to convince anybody that an sdk that can be run on a developer's linux laptop can also be made to serve pages on a linux ec2 instance.
The real payoff is going to come from hosting a cluster running a distributed database that duplicates the app engine api. I know of two projects deliberately aimed at cloning BigTable (HBase and Hypertable). A great startup business idea might be to get that running in EC2 and then be an App Engine workalike.
That would shut everyone up :)
...and then from there one could add features like more languages, and a browser-based IDE ala heroku.com
The web is getting a lot more interesting!
by Rob Lazzurs, 2008/04/15 11:21:02 +0000
I am very impressed, as one of the other posters said, code talks.
Thank you very much for this excellent service and the code, I hope Google don't decide to go and do something silly.
Take care.
by Dmitriy, 2008/04/15 14:42:26 +0000
Cool stuff. I got your code from github and packaged it into an elastic server at <a href="http://es.cohesiveft.com/server/details/1414-appdrop2-10-1208269291-VMware">http://es.cohesiveft.com/server/details/1414-appdrop2-10-1208269291-VMware</a>
From there one can include it in virtual servers built for vmware, xen, parallels or deploy straight to EC2 without creating an AMI.
You can create your own packages too and let people include them in their own elastic servers.
by Tim, 2008/04/15 16:19:22 +0000
About BigTable, a possible clone-API implementation is maybe Amazon's SimpleDB (for now, at any rate).
by John, 2008/08/12 15:26:09 +0000
I'm agree that App Landing is a good name
by spoon, 2008/08/15 13:00:13 +0000
I'm agree with you, you are quite right
by Matt, 2009/01/26 21:52:11 +0000
If you're looking for a quick introduction to the Google App Engine check out http://www.squidoo.com/Google-App-Engine
by Mike, 2009/03/24 19:12:51 +0000
with regards to using a real distributed database instead of the file-based backend that comes with the SDK, check out this project to use MongoDB as a backend.