Yousef Ourabi

Josh Nichols wrote a article describing his experiences playing with Heroku and this got me thinking about Heroku vs App Engine — I had mentioned in my April 8th post (”App Engine and Django For the Win“) that it would be interested to see how the competitors played out (Heroku, AWS vs App Engine)

It will be interesting to see how this plays out on one hand you have heroku the all in one IDE/Enviroment for Ruby On Rails that is backed by Amazon AWS and auto-deploys for you (to the Amazon cloud) and on the other hand you have Python, Django and Google App engine with a similar but different model.

Revisiting this thought process I think Heroku is probably in a rather secure position. The App engine team has mentioned numerous times that they will support multiple languages. In fact the App Engine configuration file (app.yaml) already contains a runtime directive which currently can only be set to “python”.

runtime: python

However, in my opinion it is highly unlikely that Ruby will be supported in the near term future, giving Heroku enough of a first mover advantage.

There have been some rumors that the next language implementation will be Java: (Java the Next App Engine Language). This makes a fair amount of sense. As the author notes Google permits only a select group of programming languages: C++, Java, Python, and JavaScript.There is also another reason that Java might be the next App Engine Language: The Dalvik VM.

Google has Guido van Rossum to help with the customization of the Python interpreter/Environment for App Engine, and Google has the Dalvik VM team for a custom Java VM for App Engine code, probably a slightly modified version of the Dalvik VM used in Google Andriod.

Heroku is also part IDE (web based). There is a difference in providing a hosting solution and developer tools. Google has never really expressed any serious interest in developer tools.

The analog here is AWS to Heroku is Google to App Engine (except that App Engine is obviously a Google team).

I think the only front Heroku and App Engine will compete on is developer mind share. This isn’t to say Heroku is safe, after all Google can drop serious money on developer programs like the I/O conference. However, I just don’t think App Engine will implement Rails and defeat the purpose of Heroku (any time soon at least).

However, Heroku is well positioned to disrupt Engine Yard — and I hope they do.

Filed under: Cloud Computing