GOOGLE APP ENGINE

When the two of us first heard the promise of Google App Engine, we realized that the chance to bring this kind of simplicity to Java developers was too good of an opportunity to pass up. When App Engine launched publicly, we were excited to see that Java language support was both the first and the most popular request filed in the Issue Tracker. We were also thrilled to see that this enthusiasm extended beyond the Java language to all of the various programming languages that have been implemented on top of the Java virtual machine -- not to mention all of the popular web frameworks and libraries.

But we also knew that Java developers are choosy:

* They live by their powerful tools (Eclipse, Intellij, NetBeans, Ant, etc.).
* They try to avoid lock-in and strive for re-use. Standards-based development (defacto or otherwise) is key.
* They harness sophisticated libraries to perform language feats which are nearly magical (GWT, Guice, CGLIB, AspectJ, etc...).
* They even use alternate languages on the JVM, like Groovy, Scala, and JRuby.

We wanted to give developers something that they could be ecstatic about, but we knew we would have to marry the simplicity of Google App Engine with the power and flexibility of the Java platform. We also wanted to leverage the App Engine infrastructure -- and by extension Google's infrastructure -- as much as possible, without giving up compatibility with existing Java standards and tools.

And so that's what we did. App Engine now supports the standards that make Java tooling great. (We're working on the tooling too, with Google Plugin for Eclipse). It provides the current App Engine API's and wraps them with standards where relevant, like the Java Servlet API, JDO and JPA, javax.cache, and javax.mail. It also provides a secure sandbox that's powerful enough to run your code safely on Google's servers, while being flexible enough for you to break abstractions at will.