Google launches a new activity called Google App Engine that actually works as an application cloud service. It provides the environment, the infrastructure and the storage needed to develop and deploy new applications. In other words, it's designed to completely house your project, and to integrate easily with Google services. It's been opened up to the first 10,000 developers that request an account — free of charge. And, in the pure Google-style, it's expected to remain free — at least to some extent.

There's, however, one major constrain with this new system: you’ll be particularly limited in your development style. Are you a PHP developer? ASP/.net developer? Just about any kind of developer? You’re likely going to be out of luck here. No, this isn’t a proprietary Google way of coding things, but it is limited, at present, to Python as the development environment.

On the practical side, Google App Engine makes it easy to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data. The environment includes the following features dynamic web serving (with full support for common web technologies), persistent storage with queries, sorting and transactions, automatic scaling and load balancing, APIs for authenticating users and sending email using Google Accounts, and a fully featured local development environment that simulates Google App Engine on your computer. With the basic account, you get up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month. And finally, there's also a sandbox that places your application in its own secure, reliable environment that is independent of the hardware, operating system and physical location of the web server.

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» Read more about it on Google App Engine's blog