Google IO announcements – Google Wave!! App engine now supports Java!

This years Google IO event has had two particularly interesting announcements. Google Wave, and Java programming support for Google App Engine.

OK, this is going to ROCK THE WORLD!
Ever thought about an app that can combine the best things about email, IM, wiki’s, photos, intelligent spell checking, translation, and so much more, all in one?
Well Google have done it and it’s called Google Wave.

Announced at this years Google IO event Google Wave is going to CHANGE THE WAY YOU THINK ABOUT COMMUNICATION. Think Gmail, MSN, Wiki, Facebook, and Flickr all in one.
It uses a hosted conversation model to allow real time collaboration, email, IM, conversations, all sorts.
I can’t explain how awesome this is, you really need to check out the video.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ[/youtube]

The video is about 1hour 20mins long, however you should at least check out the first 45mins (starts off slow but once they show it in action you’ll be amazed).

More info :
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-wave.html
http://wave.google.com/
http://www.waveprotocol.org/

—— Google App Engine : NOW WITH JAVA!! ——–

Google App Engine now supports Java!
For those that don’t know Google App Engine allows people to write programs that run on Googles extremely large (cloud computing) hardware. It is like Amazon Web Services, but without the system administration required although you need to program in either Python or Java and they take care of the scaling of the web app.
This is a particularly good time for anyone who uses GWT (Google Web Toolkit) to program their web apps (like like Google Wave is).

Pros :
* You don’t have to worry about server admin, distributed computing algorithms, clustered database hosting, etc..
* They have a decent amount of free monthly usage (enough for nearly a million page impressions depending on the app), which allows for almost non-existent development costs.
* They have cheaper bandwidth costs than Amazon EC2, and the like.

Cons :
* They don’t have a relational database system. The supported database, BigTable is only a single database, requiring a number of back end changes to existing systems and a complete redesign of most database structures.
* It doesn’t support the complete set of Python or Java, some operations just don’t make sense in a distributed computing environment, although the changes required are much less than if you were running your own distributed computing application.

More info :
http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_App_Engine
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BigTable
http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/