Socks and Sandals

I was just reading about In/Out, 37signals’ internal Twitter clone over on their blog and it struck me how they sometimes mutilate context in their writings. First of all, DHH knows the Twitter guys well. Second of all, they didn’t even mention that it was inspired by Twitter and even went so far as to refute this in the comments. I guess a place that’s know for its “creativity” has to keep up the appearances of being innovative…

UPDATE: Apparently, as the comments state, I am wrong about this. My bad. Nevermind this post.

I just cleaned up the back room last night. Looks like its time for bookshelf #3 ;-)

I was thinking about AppEngine some more today and it occurred to me that not only could AppEngine be responsible for a lot of people learning/using Python, but it very well might be Python’s answer to Rails. Its so-called “killer app”, if you will.

Up until this point, Python has been plagued with multiple, competing Web frameworks all taking some mindshare and there really hasn’t been a strong rallying point in the Python Web community like Rails. It appears that Django has been winning out in the blogosphere lately, but its nothing like Rails’ devout following in Ruby-land.

However, with AppEngine, Google does Rails one better: instead of just making it easy to code your app, they make it just as easy as Rails to code and dirt simple to deploy and reduce the operation maintenance to near zero. The need for things like ActiveRecord and migrations is pretty reduced in the AppEngine environment, as is all but a tiny knowledge of SQL (called GQL in that realm). That’s really, really attractive if you’re a Web consultancy shop that’s looking to turn over clients as fast as possible or a side project with a mandate for speed, quality and low cost. To me, that seems like it would be worth learning a little Python for.

AppEngine is pretty clearly aimed at Facebook’s F8 platform but it could end up hitting Python with a major boost in popularity as an aside. I bet Guido is smiling all the way to the bank on this one…

I just read a little bit about the recent announcement of Google AppEngine and I think its a pretty good service overall for certain kinds of Web applications. Unlike the rumors that were floating about prior to its announcement, its not a competitor to AWS directly, nor even a competitor to Ning as some have also claimed. To me, it seems more directly in competition with Heroku if such a thing could even be said. It is clearly based on Bigtable, though, so that part of the rumor appears to have been true.

Being so simple has some advantages and presents some interesting constraints. Because you don’t have root and can’t run the “box” yourself, you’re forced to think simply about the app itself. This seems as if it would be quite a welcome constraint for a lot of Web developers who don’t care about running a network. But the constraint really serves to enable Google-style scalability at its heart. As well, the use of CGI allows Google to run your code wherever they deem it best at the moment underneath, without you having to care about that sort of thing. This is something they already do quite well.

As well, the lack of a traditional RDBMS is something that obviously works well in a shared-nothing environment and makes a lot of sense since Google’s infrastructure is already based on such. This gives real credence to the idea that the RDBMS isn’t the be-all-end-all and will introduce a lot of developers out there to this new way of thinking.

A few things I don’t like:

• Users of an AppEngine app must login with Google Accounts
• You do have to upload your Python source to Google and this leads to obvious privacy and IP concerns
• No recurring job scheduling (essential for lots of different kinds of apps)

One more obvious thing is that an application built on AppEngine is one that is much, much easier for Google to acquire than one that is not. Don’t underestimate that piece of it, as its likely this service will be a loss-leader for Google.

Finally, I think this announcement will be very good for Python. As AppEngine only supports Python right now and for the foreseeable future, anyone interested in AppEngine will have to learn some Python. This will shed some more light on Python for people who might not have otherwise given it a try.

UPDATE: Apparently, others agree about the acquisition potential of apps on AppEngine. Good stuff.

I’ve been using Twitter for some time now and I post to Twitter orders of magnitude more than I post to this blog. With my blog, I don’t feel like I should post something unless I have something interesting or funny to say that others would like to spend some time reading. However, Twitter makes it easy to just post whatever I’m doing or thinking at any random time, reply to other’s conversations, keep up on what’s going on with friends, etc.

I really like the Twitter model, too, in that there are some very interesting constraints:

• messages are 140 characters or less
• Twitter auto-shortens links with tinyurl
• no embedded audio/video (I’m looking at you, Pownce)
• very simple network model (follow and be followed)

Twitter’s been the whipping post of the Internet for the past year because they had some well-known scaling issues and this was incorrectly blamed on their underlying Web framework, Ruby on Rails. Twitter’s got some things going for it as far as an interesting example of scaling, though, in that the model is so simple. I’ve been playing around in my mind with designing a Twitter clone in Erlang or Stackless with no RDBMS just as a mental exercise. More on that if it ever becomes concrete-er-ish.

In any case, my blog isn’t going to die for a while but if you really want to keep up with every little thing with me you should follow me on Twitter ;-)