Rowland Watkins

Google have taken a first step by exposing part of their infrastructure capability through their new [invitation-only] Google App Engine. It’s a Python-based infrastructure that provides access to many core services using by Google – more information here.

While I haven’t been lucky enough to get to the head of the waiting list, I have played around with the SDK released by Google, which offers a complete development environment, including a development server. I haven’t utilised all interfaces yet, just looking at what Google offers in terms of interfaces for remote connections to other WWW services.

Google have been quite sensible in creating a sandbox for running potentially hazardous third-party developer code, removing access to many core Python modules that use C interfaces. This is OK, until you want to do something exciting like HTTPS GET – urlfetch will perform the GET, but has no way of validating the server. That’s not too bad, but it’s not clear if urlfetch even provides the ability to access the TLS session and for the developer to validate the certificate themself – seems like a valid alternative.

It would be nice if Google at least loosen the rope a little more to provide full TLS functionality. Of course, what I really want to do is TLS with mutual auth – that should be good fun. In the mean time, I’ll see what I can do with other TLS toolkits that run in pure Python.