Google App Engine and misc..
After initial speculation that Googles ’storage’ announcement yesterday would be a ‘BigTable‘ web service, it looks like they’ve changed the game in a much bigger fashion again with the release of Google App Enigine. Huge win for Python and django framework in particular. It’s suppsed to be language neurtal, but I wonder if that includes java.. Java would be the biggest win for Google, not only is it the natural backend for GWT client applications (GWT is java development environment, even though it generates javascript behind the scenes) but its the key to getting applications out of the enterprise and hosted on Google. The pricing will also be interesting, no announcements on that yet..
Also, on a completely different topic, I was tracking down an odd timestamp issue yesterday where timestamps were still on winter time. Given that our server is based in the US (we use Joyent) I assumed that the servers hadn’t adjusted to summertime. However, the servers were running on GMT time, which is the timezone that I thought we lived in, but, I was wrong - we live in IST (Irish Standard Time) - full explanation on wikipedia here. Google will tell you the GMT time by typing ‘time GTM’ into the search box (and compare that to just typing ‘time’, which returns IST for me). File under ‘you learn something new everyday’.