Leveraging Google App Engine in your GIS Applications

April 8th, 2008 · 4 Comments · GIS

I’ve blogged about Amazon Web Services and how one can leverage those services to develop scaleable applications, but now Google has gotten into the act. Google App Engine will let you to develop scaleable web applications using the same Google technology that powers their own web applications such as Google Maps and Gmail. Taking a quick look at the Google App Engine Docs really shows how this can be a great toolkit for GIS developers. A Python Runtime, Datastore API (Bigtable) and a URL Fetch API all line up very well with where GIS web applications are going.

Tags:

4 responses so far ↓

1 ChrisW // Apr 9, 2008 at 5:44 am

Interesting stuff if you want to build yet another blog web app, but has anybody seen any info on how you’d put spatial data into Google’s BigTable store? It’s all very well abstracting away the data layer and eliminating direct access to the actual data store like this, but can you still do things like spatial queries etc through their abstraction layer? As far as I can see, their only spatial data-type is GeoPt, i.e. points, so do you have to roll your own lines/polygons etc? Or am I missing something? Wouldn’t be the first time…
2 ChrisW // Apr 9, 2008 at 5:52 am

Duh - I suppose you can always pass your requests on to external servers (e.g. WMS, WFS) using Google’s Fetch API. But then you’re losing some of the benefits of running your app on the Google platform in the first place, as it becomes just another middle tier facade which you could probably put on any other web server in any case. Still it’d be nice to leave Google to worry about the admin, I guess.

I dunno, I’m clearly too dumb/old for this game…
3 Timothy Chen Allen // Apr 10, 2008 at 11:32 am

Thanks for the heads up on this. I’ve been looking for another excuse to get into more Python web development. I keep wondering how it is that Google can do all this development and give it away for free.
4 Chad // Apr 10, 2008 at 7:18 pm

They don’t give it away for free.

Google App Engine is a “freemium” business model offering basic features for free with paid upsells available for application developers exceeding approximately 5 million pageviews a month.