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...

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.

i wish google favored telecommuters more, i'd kill to work on this team!

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.