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Java makes Google App Engine more mainstream

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Stephen Shankland CNET News

Published: 09 Apr 2009 08:54 BST

...a variety of computers and mobile devices. And for those willing to yield control, another company bears the burdens of system management and data backup.

Google also announced a handful of other developments that make App Engine more useful for regular programmers:

Through a feature called Secure Data Connector, App Engine can incorporate private data stored servers behind company firewalls, said App Engine product manager Andrew Bowers. For example, information from a company's sales database can be retrieved by App Engine and displayed in a Google Docs chart.
Using a command called 'cron', App Engine can perform some automated actions timed in advance to take place, such as collecting daily statistics and emailing them to an administrator, Bowers said.
App Engine is getting better tools for import and, later this week, export, so it is easier to move information stored in conventional databases to App Engine and back, said App Engine product manager Mike Repass. For example, custom instructions can be applied to help convert the data.

Java: a natural fit
Sun first released Java in 1995 as a way to add pizzazz to websites, but it caught on commercially as a way to run server software such as online banking applications. Java's design insulates software from the particulars of the hardware it is running on, so in a way building it into Google App Engine is a natural extension of the technology.

However, there are differences. On the plus side, running Java programs on App Engine means administrators will not have to worry about whether they have enough servers to handle a spike in traffic.

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But because App Engine stores data with Google's BigTable technology rather than the conventional SQL databases, programmers will have to use newer interfaces such as Java Data Objects (JDO) or the Java Persistence API (JPA) rather than the older Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) standard, said Kevin Gibbs, App Engine's technical leader.

Google also brought another tool to bear in the Java support: Google Web Toolkit, which converts Java software into the JavaScript code that websites use to power interactive applications.

The new version 1.6 of the open-source GWT software lets programmers use the Eclipse programming tool to write a single Java application — both the back-end processing and the JavaScript web interface — in one fell swoop, said Bowers, who also is a GWT program manager.

Google aims to comply with Java standards, though it offered cautionary words about the preliminary nature of App Engine's Java support. It has not passed Sun's Java certification tests, and Google would not comment on whether it plans to do so or on whose Java foundation it uses under the covers.

Overall, programming Java on Google App Engine should look fairly familiar to Java programmers, Gibbs said. IBM, for example, demonstrated moving an App Engine Java program to its own WebSphere software using IBM's DB2 database.

"Hopefully, it'll be a matter of months when any Java developer can use it and be really satisfied," Gibbs said.

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