14 DAY TRIAL // Much of the announcements made during the first day of the Google I/O 2011 developer conference focused on, what else, developers. Many of the company's APIs got an upgrade and some of its developer-focused services also have things to brag about.
Google App Engine has been in a testing phase of sorts for the past three years, but it is now getting ready for graduation. Google plans to take App Engine out of Labs and establish it as a stand-alone product ready for business.
It's not quite there yet, Google aims to remove the "preview" status of the app sometime in the second half of the year. Once it does that, it will also offer more reliability guarantees and other features that enterprises look for.
"Google App Engine, which provides the ability to develop and host applications on Google’s infrastructure, has grown tremendously since it launched in preview status in 2008," Greg D’Alesandre, Senior Product Manager for Google App Engine, wrote.
The numbers are interesting, Google boasts that 100,000 developers now use App Engine every month. There are 200,000 active apps hosted by the service and they get a lot of use, over 1.5 billion site views every day.
"Over the last three years, we’ve collected great feedback from our customers and now believe that the biggest thing we can do to help our customers is to graduate App Engine from preview status," D’Alesandre announced.
"When App Engine graduates from preview status, which we expect to do in the second half of this year, we’ll add additional enterprise-grade features that allow us to support many more business application scenarios," he explained.
In the meantime, Google is releasing App Engine 1.5.0 which adds a number of new features. "Backends," for example, enables App Engine to host apps that have high memory requirements and rely on long running processes.
The latest version also adds support for the Google-developed Go programming language. The support is still experimental, but it is the first compiled language added to App Engine.
When App Engine graduates from the preview phase, Google will introduce a number of features which will make it more feasible as an enterprise tool. The company will guarantee 99.95 percent uptime and will also provide much better support and help for the service.