In one of my opinion one of the coolest products that Google has launched since I’ve been working there is the Google App Engine, a service that allows anyone to write a web application and host it on Google’s servers. Google then looks after scaling your application and ensuring that as it becomes popular thousands and thousands of people can use it without you having to worry about buying physical servers and all that sort of messy stuff. It’s very cool.
Google App Engine has been live for nearly 2 months now and in that time a whole bunch of applications have been created. One of the best, in my opinion, is Wordle. You upload a bunch of text to Wordle and it creates a pretty picture that shows which words appear most frequently. I uploaded the front page of our blog (on the left) and the front page of my more technical blog (on the right) and you can see the results below (click on it for a bigger version).
Pretty cool, huh? The only downside to it is the fact that it uses a Java applet to display the resulting image and Java doesn’t get installed on most computers, so you may need to install it before you can see the image.
Try it out and if you make a cool image send me a link in the comments.
We’re off to London for the weekend in a few hours so you can expect an update on our weekend early next week sometime.
Comment from Gill on 2008-06-28
Check out my wordle!!!