engineering

Google App Engine suffers outages

One advantage of cloud computing is that it's an expert's job to keep the centralized computing infrastructure up and running. But even experts have problems, and that's what's going on Tuesday with Google's App Engine.

The service has been having outages Tuesday, according to a mailing list posting Tuesday. App Engine, launched in April and still in "preview release" mode, is a service that lets people create interactive Web applications written in the Python programming language.

"We've experienced several outages during the past 12 hours, the most recent of which started … Read more

Google modernizes Web software tool

Google plans to release later this week a near-final version of the Google Web Toolkit 1.5, software designed to ease the onerous parts of writing sophisticated Web-based software.

GWT 1.5 includes support for Java 5, a version of the Sun Microsystems programming language released in 2006, and produces software that runs about 1.2 to 2 times faster for complex Web applications, said Bruce Johnson, Google's engineering manager for GWT.

The new software fuels Google's ambition to make the Web a much richer software environment--an ambition on display Wednesday and Thursday at the Google I/… Read more

Google to preach Web 2.0 gospel to developers

Just because Google so obviously loves the idea of cloud computing, don't think the company doesn't care about what happens at the other end of the network connection, too.

As former President Bill Clinton used to say, there's a third way: Google wants to improve technology on both the server in the cloud and on the client running a Web browser. The search giant will detail its approach to at least 2,800 developers paying to attend the first Google I/O conference this week in San Francisco.

There's been a long-running tension among computing companies … Read more

Toshiba to use Cell processor in future notebook

UPDATE: Toshiba is expected to release a notebook PC this year that uses a chip based on the Cell processor, the same chip used in Sony's PlayStation.

The Toshiba Qosmio G40 notebook will sport a SpursEngine SE1000 chip based on the Cell Broadband Engine, which is also used in the Sony PlayStation 3.

The Cell Broadband Engine is a multi-core chip architecture jointly developed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. It is derived from IBM's Power Architecture, which was once used in Apple notebooks and desktops. Today, IBM uses the Cell processor in a line of blade servers.

Samples … Read more

Opening up Google's AppEngine with Morph Labs

Google's AppEngine looks great. It's a way to build web applications and run them on Google's "cloud" infrastructure.

The downside? Your applications effectively become Google's applications because there's no easy way to move them elsewhere. You have to run them using Google's authentication engine, framework, file system, APIs, etc. Free as in Google's.

Enter Morph Labs.

[Morph] claims to have done all the back-end cutwork to make it easy for developers to get their software up and running as a service on Amazon's Web Services (AWS), freeing them from Google's Microsoft-like vendor lock-in....… Read more

Photos: The Victorian engine that could

Calling all history buffs: Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2 is making its North American debut at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

A forward-thinking mathematician and engineer, Babbage designed the Difference Engine in 1847. His intent was to create an automated computing machine, but he was never able to turn his vision into reality.

Fast forward 150 years, and an impassioned Babbage expert and wealthy financier have teamed up to build Babbage's dream via a new exhibit running through next April.

See the photo gallery and video on News.com for more.

Report: Twitter fires VP of engineering

Just days after the news broke that Twitter lead architect Blaine Cook was leaving the company, it appears that the microblogging start-up has lost another techie: Silicon Alley Insider reported Thursday morning that Lee Mighdoll, vice president of engineering, will depart the company.

"After three months, both Lee and Twitter came to the conclusion that the match was not perfect," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in an e-mail to Alley Insider editor Peter Kafka. The company had hired Mighdoll in January. "We are seeking to fill this role with a refined search criteria that fits with our … Read more

Bungee Labs extends its application hosting options

Bungee Labs is extending the hosting options for its Web application development environment, Bungee Connect. Today, developers using the Bungee Connect development environment can host their applications on Bungee's multitenant grid in the U.S. and Europe or on Amazon EC2. Beginning in July in public beta, organizations will be able to deploy Bungee Connect applications via the new Bungee Application Server on their own hosting infrastructure.

Bungee Labs, along with Coghead, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Joyent, Mosso, salesforce.com, NetSuite, Microsoft and others, is paving the way to platforms-as-a-service--hosted infrastructure for developing and delivering Web applications. … Read more

Does 'platform as a service' mean developer lock-in?

As people get their heads around Google App Engine, they see some things they may not like. Namely, the dreaded "lock-in."

Tim O'Reilly dissected whether Google's App Engine is a lock-in play on Monday, and RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady hit the issue head-on with his excellent Q&A on what Google App Engine actually is.

Developers for years have been clamoring for more openness and standards. They are tenets of the open-source movement.

But as more application development moves to hosted platforms, does data and application portability get lost in "the cloud"? … Read more