App Engine Is Going To Become A Better PBBG Host

I use Ruby on Rails for all my web development work. I think it's greatly preferable to the PHP in which so many games are developed but I don't think that Rails is the only good choice out there. Another excellent alternative is Python and Django, something which Google's App Engine supports. One of the problems with App Engine though has been that it lacked certain features that are very helpful for building a PBBG. Often you want to be able to run a task on a regular basis or handle background processing and getting that from App Engine required a lot of work arounds. The latest version of the roadmap for updates scheduled for App Engine in the first half of this year includes all of that and quite a bit more.

• Service for storing and serving large files
• Datastore import and export utility for large datasets
• Billing: developers can pay for more resource usage
• Support for a new runtime language
• Support for scheduled tasks
• Task queues for performing background processing
• Incoming email support
• XMPP API (that's the ability to send and receive instant messages via the XMPP/Jabber protocol)
  

Given that many people who want to start a PBBG have often not done a lot of web development work before, I think the idea that App Engine offers a hosted environment with a lower barrier to entry so they can write an application without worrying about how to configure servers and deploy software (or perhaps scale past a few hundred players) is a good thing. I'm not going there any time soon myself, but I like to always keep an eye on it. After all, maybe soon they'll be supporting Rails as a development platform too.