More details about Google apps

* Applications can be served from the free appspot.com domain or from an external domain via Google Apps
* Python is the only language supported right now -- Google says they look forward to supporting other languages in the future, but for right now -- Python is where it is at
* Google's service API is built into App Engine -- so Google Accounts can be easily integrated into an application
* During the developer preview users are able to register up to 3 applications
* The SDK is available for Mac, Windows and Linux

From our perspective, this news is exciting -- if not for what it offers right now -- but for the potential in the future. Only initially supporting Python is a curious choice (though we are big fans of Django), but the ability for developers to execute scalable apps using Google's resources -- for free -- is extremely exciting.

Google Product manager opinion

"Google is giving a handful of web programmers the opportunity to create and run their own Web applications on their servers. Today's launch of a preview release of Google App Engine signals a new era of collaboration with third-party software developers. 'The goal is to make it easy to get started with a new Web app, and then make it easy to scale when that app reaches the point where it's receiving significant traffic and has millions of users," said Google product manager, Paul McDonald in a blog post."