Is Google's App Engine a lock-in honeypot?

Some developers fear that Google is aiming to lock them into to the App Engine platform — Google's application hosting service — but Google refutes any claim it has evil intentions.

Open source developers for years have called for more openness and standards, but as application development moves to hosted platforms such as Google's App Engine, or more closed systems like Salesforce.com's Force.com, which uses a proprietary database and query language, does data and application portability get lost in "the cloud"?

Google does not require developers to write code in its language, however open source advocate Tim O'Reilly takes Google to task for the lack of application portability: "Now, it may be that this is a temporary oversight, and that Google does intend, long-term, to make it easy for developers to export their applications. After all, Eric Schmidt says he reminds his employees all the time, "Don't fight the Internet."

Within a few days of its release, programmer Chris Anderson wrote some open-source software, called AppDrop, that shows that you can conceivably run an instance written for Google App Engine on Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon's hosted server platform. Developer Alex Bosworth listed lock-in as his top concern with Google App Engine.

It's likely that Google will allow applications written with other languages than Python, like JavaScript. But the nub of online-platform lock-in comes from the data store, Bosworth said.

One thing both Amazon and Google could do to show they are serious about their platforms is open up their data engines, which are really the core of most Web applications — open-source BigTable and SimpleDB. This would reduce lock-in and make development easier, and it might even lead to some help improving their services.

O'Grady at RedMonk, too, argued that Google should open-source portions of its infrastructure or offer an API (application programming interface) to its data store that would ease portability to other databases.

Google appears to already be on the case of data portability. On the Google App Engine Blog, software engineer Kevin Gibbs said that one planned feature is large-scale data import and export.

"With Google App Engine, you own all the data in your app. As stated in our terms, you always have the right to get your data out of Google App Engine at any point. We wouldn't have it any other way," Gibbs wrote.