Google I/O Day 1: Google App Engine and the Chrome App Store

Google made plenty of noise — and plenty of news — during Day 1 of the company’s Google I/O developer conference. I’ll zero in on two specific announcements: the big reveal of Google App Engine for Business and the Chrome Web Store. Here are some details.

Google App Engine for Business is what it sounds like: a development architecture that allows for enterprise applications to be built, scaled, and delivered through Google’s infrastructure. New to the business edition is a company-focused administration console, with features like hosted SQL databases, SSL on your company’s domain, and advanced Google server access promised for later this year.

This is a really interesting move on Google’s part. App Engine for Business doesn’t quite move Google into the infrastructure-as-a-service market currently dominated by Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), but it’s going to give companies, especially SMBs who are already using Google Apps, pause when they want to roll their own solutions.

And as a final note on that front, Google also announced a partnership with VMware such that any application developed with the SpringSource Tool Suite and the Google Web Toolkit can be deployed in the Google App Engine for Business, the VMware vCloud environment, or anywhere else up to and including Amazon EC2. They call it “cloud portability,” and it’s an idea I’d like to see more of.

Most of the I/O opening keynote, though, was given over to discussion of HTML5 and what the open standard can do for web developers – in a bit of braggadocio, Google showed off sophisticated 3D video game Lego Star Wars running right in a Chrome window. There’s a lot more to say on that front, certainly, but the upshot of the whole thing is that Google is launching the Chrome Web Store later this year.

The basic idea is what it sounds like. Developers will have the chance to list and sell their web applications on Google’s open marketplace, and have the solutions integrated by way of what they describe as “convenient shortcuts” into the Chrome browser. There aren’t too many other details at this point, but anything that lets creative and forward-thinking ISVs sell their products to a new market has me intrigued.

One last thing I want to mention: Google Wave is now available for all Google Apps domains, giving all users the ability to try the collaboration/messaging hybrid for themselves.

We’re expecting more surprises at day 2 of Google I/O, especially when it comes to the Google Android mobile operating system, so stay tuned to The VAR Guy for news and analysis from the conference this week.

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