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Google has made a bolder move into web application hosting, unveiling the preview release of its Google App Engine service.

The Google App Engine allows developers to build web applications on the same systems that power other Google applications, affording good scalability without needing to worry about infrastructure. For those who are familiar with the Python programming language, Google App Engine offers far greater flexibility than Google’s existing free hosting service, Google Pages.

In contrast to Amazon’s EC2 service, which now offers scalable hosting through Elastic IP Addresses and Availability Zones, Google App Engine allows developers to get started with its service for free. Google’s site claims that every Google App Engine application can use up to 500MB of storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for 5 million monthly page views.

With Amazon’s recent offering of low-cost web application hosting, and now Google’s free web application hosting, the conventional web hosting industry may be set to see some radical changes. With both services providing high scalability, yet without adding complexity, these could be seen as an attractive alternative to setting up a busy website on dedicated servers. Conversely, they are less likely to appeal to casual website owners, simply because the services require more knowledge and skill to use than simpler services such as Google Pages, Blogger or Apple iWeb.

The account registrations for the current preview release are limited to the first 10,000 developers, and only free accounts are available. Up to three applications can be created with a single Google App Engine account, and a number of applications have already been developed and are available at appgallery.appspot.com.

Google App Engine currently allows developers to write applications using Python 2.5, with some modules disabled for security reasons. A number of Python web frameworks will work on Google App Engine, and Django is included with the SDK for convenience.

Applications written for Google App Engine are not permitted to write to disk; instead, all data is stored in the Google App Engine datastore. A language called GQL uses SQL-like syntax to interface with the datastore. Scalability is achieved by using the Bigtable distributed storage system for structured data. The same storage system is used by a number of other popular Google projects, including web indexing, Google Earth and Google Finance.

The Google App Engine team have set up a new blog for the service at googleappengine.blogspot.com

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Darl McBride entered a courtroom to assert his rights regarding legacy System V code, which he still contends exists within Linux. This despite years of discovery turning up zero evidence to support the assertion. Ars reports from the scene of the Novell v. SCO trial.

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SAN DIEGO - A woman who escaped from a Detroit prison 32 years ago has been arrested in San Diego, where she was married with three children and living under a false name, authorities said. The decades-old drug charges are from when she was just 19.

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America’s favorite working-class hero reminds us of her $109 million post-White House windfall in this revealing moment on Falafel Bill O’Reilly’s teevee show. (Plus a bonus clip!)

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Error Message: Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords

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At a closed-door meeting with California’s superdelegates, Bill Clinton stunned witnesses with a meltdown where he blasted Bill Richardson’s endorsement of Barack Obama. Delegates said it was the ‘worst political meeting ever.’

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Think the dollar is weak against the euro? Pit it against the funny money found in these games and you’ll be crying all the way to the check-cashing place.

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“It’s sad that the ISO was not willing to admit that its process was failing horribly,
” he said, noting that Microsoft intensely lobbied many countries that traditionally have not participated in ISO and stacked technical committees with Microsoft employees, solution providers and resellers sympathetic to OOXML.

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Over the past few years, we have watched Apple climb the music sales chart courtesy of the iTunes. Last month we learned that Apple passed Best Buy to become the number two retailer in the the US. Now, Apple has ascended to the top of the charts, surpassing Wal-Mart for the first time ever, according to the NPD MusicWatch Survey.

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Whether you’re running a single server with a few accounts or a massive ISP infrastructure, managing more than one domain quickly becomes a boring, time-consuming hassle. But thanks to the magic of open source and the guys at ISPConfig, this no longer has to be the case.

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