Google App Engine

Google Applications Platform Development

MVI has built multiple apps on Google Apps Engine as we attempt to stay ahead of the development in the industry. Google push to get more developer activity is one that MVI embraces and a direction that we believe will influence the next wave of development.

Google is trying to get more users called GAE’s to work on their application development platform. Google wants to increase the number of users and the amount they use the Web, and improving the platform is the best way to do that, with a new emphasis on developing social applications, reflecting Web development in general. Google’s desire is to include ways to use Open Social, which is designed to let people share information on social networks among different applications, additionally tracking on mobile development, including ways to use Google Gears for Mobile and Android, the mobile phone platform Google and its partners introduced last November.

Google, of course, is hardly the only tech company that is attracting Web developers to their “platform.” Salesforce.com sells subscriptions to a customer relationship management application, but when you talk to the company, you quickly understand that he is betting that its development platform, called Force.com, will fuel growth in the future.

Other Web giants–Yahoo, eBay, and Amazon–all have their own developer programs as well. But the company set to shake things up the most in Web service development is Microsoft, which just hosted its own Mix Web development conference.It already has many application programming interfaces (APIs) to its Web services, from Virtual Earth to Windows Live Messenger, and continues to release more.

More significantly, Microsoft understands platforms, how to build a thriving “ecosystem” of third-party applications and partners, and how to make money for everyone involved. Microsoft is providing a unifying development model for a wide range of applications, from classic client-server Windows applications to Web services mashups using Silverlight.

On a technical level, Google’s push to attract developers to the Web has a slightly different flavor than others. Google’s focus with tools and APIs is JavaScript and good Ajax development practices. Of course, Google doesn’t have a legacy development tools business, like Microsoft or Adobe that needs to be refreshed tooling to write applications for the Internet “cloud.” In addition, Google wants to promote technologies that work in all browsers, not things like Flash or Silverlight that require a special plug-in and are proprietary.

Google is going to push the Web forward, in a way that benefits everyone. With no underlying platform being sold, Google is trying to improve the Web as a platform to increase usage of the Internet as a whole. Google’s engineers were able to push the boundaries of Ajax. Its’ first release of Google Maps, where users can drag a map around a browser, inspired many developers to push the limits of Ajax.

One of the goals of Google is to garner some feedback from developers on where they are hitting the limits of Web development. But it’s clear that Google wants to ride the momentum toward more capable Web applications.