Google App Engine beta

It is almost unfair to review the Google App Engine when it is just a beta operation, but Google has a habit of leaving some tools in beta form for a long time. There are a number of places where the documentation and the code suggest that Google will add more functionality pretty soon. The basic framework and the database are both quite nice, although limited. We can imagine Google adding better automatic features for generating the CRUD (Create, Update, Delete) routines common in these applications. Integration with Google's Wallet might also be quite useful, although it's bound to be complicated by the banking system. Some people have already experimented with mapping the Google Web Toolkit to the system, even though that's written in Java and translated into JavaScript. Google might also provide some good tools that allow the different hosted applications to share user information, in essence allowing a user to move their preferences and some of their data to other applications. This kind of inter-application linking could be pretty cool. Time will tell what Google delivers. In the meantime, this is a good sandbox for playing with simple database applications. There's a very good reason why the beta version has a waiting list.