Seth Ladd's Blog

Google App Engine was just announced. Scalable, integrated applications hosted on Google's cloud. I'm particularly interested in the Datastore . Take that, Amazon SimpleDB , Datastore supports ordering result sets! After a tour through the examples, it's safe to say that App Engine is not a direct competitor to Amazon's general purpose cloud offerings, such as EC2 and S3. App Engine is targeted directly at request/response web applications. Amazon's offerings are much more generic, allowing you to run whatever you want on EC2. App Engine's data store is closer to a traditional database than Amazon's SimpleDB. With App Engine, you have a query language that looks and smells familiar. SimpleDB is a distributed hash. Both technologies are useful, but if you're comfortable with SQL, you'll find App Engine's Datastore more friendly. Also interesting is that App Engine has direct support for Google Accounts. Don't want to write Yet Anothe

Proper web architecture dictates that a you should " Assign distinct URIs to distinct resources ." And Cool URIs for the Semantic Web states that: There should be no confusion between identifiers for Web documents and identifiers for other resources. URIs are meant to identify only one of them, so one URI can't stand for both a Web document and a real-world object. So we know that a URI should refer to one and only one resource. (Of course, you may have many URIs all referring to the same resource.) So why do so many web sites have URIs like http://www.example.org/myaccount ? That same URI is used to refer to any account in the system, depending on who is logged in. And that makes Baby Semantic Web cry. Why is the baby sobbing? A generic URI like http://www.example.com/myaccount isn't useful on the semantic web, because it's very difficult to make meaningful statements about that URI. Let's go and try. http://www.example.com/myaccount is the account