New York — On the eve of its’ first-ever developer conference, Web search leader Google Inc. unlocked the doors for its Google App Engine to all takers Tuesday and would offer additional computing resources for developers this year and announced pricing details for the service.
More announcements in addition to its almost 100 in-depth technical sessions, are expected Wednesday and Thursday this week at Google’s first event, called Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, also holds great symbolic importance: It is Google’s strongest statement to date of its deep, long-term commitment to external developers. Google said over 2,900 developers have signed up for the event.
The company at its Google I/O conference in San Francisco moreover will increase access to the service and add APIs for caching and image manipulation. As a result, Google is undertaking the challenge of meeting these programmers’ heightened expectations about the company’s developer technology, support, training and terms of service. The service has been in a limited preview period since early April.
Google’s App Engine, which the company first launched in April as a free preview service, provides hosted high-powered Web serving, continual storage, automatic scaling, a local development environment, and authentication and load balancing aimed at making it easier for developers to build Web applications.
Google has promoted it as a way for developers to take advantage of the search giant’s own infrastructure to build, test and run their own applications.
Through its App Engine program, Google is anticipating to address the issue of it being too complicated to develop Web applications. “With App Engine, we hope to reduce that difficulty,” by making the development experience easier and removing the startup costs, said Pete Koomen, product manager for App Engine at Google.
App Engine was in the beginning available only to the first 10,000 developers to sign up, will allow anyone to use the service, which had gradually grown to 60,000 developers. “We have decided to open the floodgates,” Koomen said.
“More than 150,000 developers have been on the product’s waiting list.”
Developers utilizing Google App Engine, which allows outsiders build Web applications on the same infrastructure that runs Google’s own applications, will have the free version available up to 500 megabytes of storage and enough computing power and bandwidth for about 5 million page views per month.
Google further plans to expand those limits on a paid basis said it would charge developers depending on how much storage and bandwidth they require beyond the free quota and today announced price plans, which have yet to be finalized and would be effective later this year after a preview period has ended — developers will pay:
- $0.10 – $0.12 per CPU core-hour
- $0.15 – $0.18 per GB-month of storage
- $0.11 – $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth
- $0.09 – $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth
The announcement comes at a time of growing interest in Software as a Service (SaaS) applications that are widely accessible via the Web. To further its attraction to enterprise users and mobile professionals, SaaS vendors, including Google, have started to offer offline access to some of its programs as well.
“We are tremendously excited by the variety of applications we have seen built so far,” said Koomen, noting there has been a range of both consumer and enterprise applications. While there are other hosting platforms for Web applications, such as Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3), Koomen said Google has taken a different approach. “This is not a general computing platform,” he said. “We are making it simple to build a Web application and scale.”
Google also said that it will be adding new developer APIs for the Google App Engine in the coming weeks; a new image-manipulation API will allow developers to scale, rotate and crop images on the server, and a new memcache API is aimed at making page rendering faster for developers through a high performance caching layer.
Google also announced Tuesday at I/O its Google Web Toolkit Release Candidate 1.5 that will be available later this week.
The Web Toolkit that includes Java 5 language support is intended to help develop and debug Web applications using Java and then deploy them as highly optimized JavaScript. Google said this process lets developers sidestep common AJAX headaches like browser compatibility, and also gain significant performance and productivity gains. In addition this next release includes a compiler for producing faster code and a growing set of libraries for building AJAX applications, Google said.
With App Engine, programmers need not concern themselves with such functions as provisioning of machines. “There is a lot there, and it is often very time-consuming,” as well as costing money, Koomen said.
Koomen emphasized that the basic idea behind App Engine is to make some of the tools Google’s been using in-house to develop Web apps will now be available to outside developers. Google is not saying how many applications thus far have been developed but Koomen said there has been many designed to enhance social networks.