Enterprise support for Google Apps engine is surely ramping up. You can now run Java 5 and 6 code on Google App Engine as long as it doesn’t break the security sandbox on Google’s servers. Given that most enterprises have standardized on either .NET or Java, this announcement alone is very big news since only Python was supported previously in GAE. This also means just about any programming language capable of running within a JVM now works in GAE as well. Google has also came to the decision to support Java platform capabilities such as dependency injection, aspect-oriented programming (AOP), and expression language runtimes. Google has already tested GAE with Groovy, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Scala, and Scheme, well-known languages that developers are very interested in at the moment.
The new Secure Data Connector (SDC) in GAE provides a secure tunnel into organizations that want to use their data, Web services, and SOAs from within GAE, without moving the data itself out into the cloud. SDC requires Google Apps Premier Edition, which brings along some potential entanglements, but in return provides a fully encrypted connection between Google App Engine applications and enterprise data inside the firewall. SDC also provides declarative filters to prevent inadvertent exposure of business data as well as OAuth, which is becoming popular for enabling safe access via open standards to secure Web APIs, for providing secure access to internal SOA services with best practices. With SDC, GAE can directly and safely access a much broader wealth of enterprise data than was possible previously, without the challenges of uploading titanic enterprise datasets across the Internet into Google’s data center as well as dealing with GAE’s still somewhat limited datastore.
Some types of application, however, particularly very high performance ones, will require enterprise data to be moved into Google’s cloud. The new GAE database import tools allows businesses to bulk load their data off their premises and into GAE. This will allow enterprises to more easily and quickly migrate production datasets into GAE as needed. Note that only database import is offered for now, though Google promises to offer a way to bulk export data in the very near future.
GAE originally offering computing based on an exclusive request/response model, just like the Web itself (HTTP GET/POST, etc.) This makes the GAE computing platform operate only when an inbound request comes in form the network but is a limitation when background processing has to take place. Previously, businesses had to establish their own batch jobs external to GAE using their own facilities. With built-in Cron support, GAE now supports both request/response and background processing, which is required to to meet a robust set of enterprise application requirements since background processing is critical for tasks like backups, report generation, asynchronous processing, etc.
