If you like what Google has done so far in terms of web apps, you may be in for a treat. Today Google announced a preview release of their app engine, which will provide you with lots of infrastructure you can use to create your own web-based applications:

We just launched a preview release of Google App Engine, a way for developers to run their web applications on Google's infrastructure. In the same way that Blogger made it easy to create a blog, Google App Engine is designed from the ground up to make it easy to create and run web applications.

One of the nice things about this application framework is that you don't have to solve some of the problems that Google has already tackled. For example, the Google File System and BigTable. These systems let you work with and store large amounts of data with an abstraction that uses the underlying Google infrastructure.

Of course, we can't help but wonder if this is yet another step towards GoogleWorld (tm). Particularly when you compare the come-on with that you might get from your friendly corner dealer of illicit substances:

Google App Engine is free to use during the preview release, but the amount of computing resources any app can use is limited. In the future, developers will be able to purchase additional computing resources as needed...

That's right, the first one's free, the second one's on me, and why worry about anything past that?

Better jump on the preview fast though, the initial subscription is limited to 10,000 developers, and I guarantee you that this quota will be filled quickly.