After reading all the negative publicity that google's new application engine is generating -- I couldn't believe my eyes!

Could it really be that bad?

Or are these people just crazy paranoid schizofreakazoids with nothing better to do than write mealy-mouthed whinge posts about a whole pile of baloney?

So I signed up, downloaded the sdk, and got my hands stuck right in there. Then I waded through all the contractual jibber jabber and came to my own conclusion:

Yep, evil.

Read the fine print guys! Sheesh!

Every page of your application must have the "Google Rocks" logo in all four corners. The only language you can use is Gython -- Google Python, accessing your data via Gorm -- the Google ORM. The cost is fifty bucks per click -- that's google dollars -- bought at the google exchange rate. Plus, your code gets locked in Google's basement (aka GFS) for ever and ever.

Serious though, this cloud computing stuff (see also EC2 from Amazon, IBM blue cloud) looks pretty amazing.

Cough, cough, (Just making sure Ray Ozzie is awake). I'm going to say that a little louder.

this cloud computing stuff looks pretty amazing!

You freakin' got that yet Microsoft?

And this is just the very early days.

We will hear a hell of a lot of hype about this concept yet.

Then we will go through a bitter trough of disillusionment.

And then there will arise that grand surging tide of productivity as the vision is finally realised, five years from now, by which time we'll all be considering it old skool, as we float around in our hovering moped-atron-segways, reading e-newspaper articles about how Wikipedia bought Microsoft in exchange for a vintage single core computer from the e-smithsonian.

And then apple will put out a hand held elastic compute cloud, and six-year-old african kids will be wearing them as a fashion accessory.

Ah, back to reality:

Google will soon unveil Ruby as language number 2 on the platform. This right now... this is just the fluffer ;-)