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Google Inside Web Apps: How to build thousands more of them..

Step 1: Collect more data into Bigtable...

Google won the web search war. After that Google turns its attention to web users trying to pull every bits of information from them into the Bigtable. Google has developed few dozens of data collection web applications, e.g., Gmail, Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Code, Google Groups, Google Analytics, Google Talk, Google Base, and Google Health. For several years, I wonder what will Google do with all the data collected in the Bigtable?

After playing with Google App Engine for some time, I now believe that the main objective of App Engine was not to compete with companies like Amazon (S3/EC2) for the market share in cloud computing. Google already has one of the best cloud computing infrastructure. What is missing for Google? ...more Bigtable programmers!!! App Engine is a massive training project developed by Google to train Bigtable programmers. The gate was opened at Google I/O last month. All 150,000 on the waiting list are accepted into the App Engine program.

However, there is a big surprised waiting for these new recruits. Almost everything one has learned so far about web application development will not be applicable in App Engine. For example, you will find no use for knowledge on:

• Operating Systems: Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS, ...
• Web/App servers: Tomcat, IIS, WebLogic, Websphere, JBoss, ...
• Web/App Frameworks: Spring, Rails, ASP.net, ...
• Databases: Oracle, MySQL, SQL server, DB2, ...
• Languages: Java, C#, PHP, VB, Ruby, Perl, ...

Like most people, I have to learn a new language, Python, and a new application framework, Django, to program against a new datastore, Bigtable. The only piece of prior knowledge that I found useful was from work done using AltaVista/Lucene/Nutch at a Web 1.0 search start up many years ago. Several techniques used then are applicable in solving Bigtable programming problems.

Google may be able to develop a hundred more Google Inside web applications on its own. However, to do more than that Google will have to rely on outside resources. A possible solution is to allow the next generation of Bigtable programmers to build web apps accessing Google data in the Bigtable directly. These apps, being inside Google, will have significant advantages over apps running outside that access Bigtable data via Google web APIs. With the ability to do server-side mashup inside Google, one can archive things that are not possible today's with client-side mashup technology. Thousands more new Google Inside web apps will be created to offer us more features than we can think of and, most importantly, to generate more profits for Google.

Posted at 10:32PM Jun 08, 2008 by tientienli in Personal  |