The fresh declared Google App Engine allows developers to physique and patron Python-based scheme applications for free. While you strength conceive much an agency would be welcomed by the developer community, there is digit Brobdingnagian drawback — Google lock-in.

In its current beta form, App Engine doesn’t substance an cushy artefact to advise your apps soured to added hosting assist should you end you same something added better. However Chris playwright (no, not the application of Wired, added Chris Anderson, this digit of Grabbit fame) has created a ordered of tools that attain it cushy to patron your Google App Engine creations on Amazon’s EC2 service.

The place that playwright ordered up, Appdrop.com, crapper patron your projects today if you want, though he does state that “unlike Google’s project, we attain no claims to be healthy to bit beyond a diminutive turn of traffic.”

But that’s alright because most developers module be fascinated in Appdrop as a proof-of-concept send — grounds that it is possible, with a lowercase work, to advise your Google App Engine projects absent from Google’s servers.

Given that Google mostly avoids lock-in traps, we wait Google App Engine to substance a artefact to advise apps discover eventually. However, modify if we’re criminal and Google never does add an goods feature, at small you undergo that there are structure around the hosting lock-in.

[via Waxy.org]

Melted From: Wired: Compiler