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rxin
If every one on the app engine team is in the picture, it is actually a pretty small team, given the size of Google and the impact of the project.
th0ma5
i wish google favored telecommuters more, i'd kill to work on this team!
rbanffy
I'm worried with the emphasis on Java over Python (Java is mentioned a good couple times more than Python on the job posting).

OTOH, this could mean they acknowledge the Java version needs improvements.

rxin
They are recruiting people to improve the app engine infrastructure, which is probably mostly written in Java.
felipemnoa
Why worry about a specific language? Just learn both.
rbanffy
I already know Java. I just prefer Python ;-)
th0ma5
Could be a thing like a Java program would like to do some Python stuff and could get into it quickly, but I would think a seasoned Python person might get testy with Java quicker. Then again Python people usually know a few languages anyway :P
bedatadriven
dude, if you spend any amount of time on the edges of GAE development, you'll quickly find that java is the second-class citizen by far; witness the retard with which java versions of the appengine pipeline or mapreduce libraries follow the python versions... if anything more java developers will help the java runtime achieve parity with the python version...
jjm
By using a totally in-house host of backend servers, db, mapr, language bindings, apis, and what not...

Q: Will it get increasingly harder to roll new technologies? (I point to how long it has taken and still on going to get Django, Python, and etc running).

Q: Is the Appengine platform being used for anything other than small internal products?

I feel like if Google/AppEngine gave us a more agnostic sandboxed (apis) VMs ala Heroku/DotCloud/BlahBlah/ or even raw (yet limited) boxes such as Ec2 or Joyent and just let us wire it up to 'BigTable' then it would be a win-win. Leveraging existing tech, with in-house DB (BigTable) instead of re-writing the __entire__ stack to the point where apps are not 'compatible'. Yet even then, I see that a full SQL implementation is in the works...

There just has to be a better way...

tednaleid
From what I've seen, they haven't been able to even manage the technologies that they've got now. Python on appengine is still at 2.5, something I voted to get updated (to at least 2.6) back in 2008.

http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=75...

776 people have starred the issue (so far). It's now 3 years later (python 2.6 was released 10/1/2008) with no sign of upgrade.

Hopefully some of this new team will be used to support what they've already launched.