For all its usefulness, where are those wonderful hypercard stacks now? That's right you can't use them anymore or at least not that easily. This is due to the fact that it's a proprietary platform that the vendor stopped supporting.

Although google's appengine is more open, a lot of its key components are proprietary and can't be easily rebuilt. So while hypercard and appengine are both wonderful technologies, I believe people should prefer something more open. This allows you have an out in case google stops supporting appengine or does something that prevents you from using it effectively.

I violently agree. I am upset that others dont see this. Hypercard was great, that that is totaly irrelevant now. Is everyone so short sighted and money grubbing not to see it this time? Why do we have to repeat this over and over.

But porting your GAE application to another provider is easy, it won't automatically have the scaling capabilities and the Google login is a problem but mostly they can be easily ported.

yeah it appears doable, it doesn't appear to be googles intent to lock people in (but then I am sure it wasn't the intent of hypercard either).

Its still up to the diligence of the people who write the app. The problem with hypercard, was that the people using the app were the ones that created the cool stuff, and the people maintaining hypercard wouldn't/couldn't keep it going for them.

Actually now that I think about it, because Google is now an OpenId provider, you can probably just accept OpenIds when you port it out of GAE and everything will work fine.

well that solves the least interesting problem at least ;)

Why hasn't Amazon made it easier to build web applications with EC2/S3?

I'm waiting for Amazon to respond with something similar. Just to get an application up and running on Amazon seems to involve delving into message boards (I have EC2/S3 accounts but it's learning how to port my web app is not a priority at the moment)

The premise of EC2/S3 is that you can ask for services/CPU on demand - however Google with AppEngine has significantly lowered the barrier to creating a scalable web app (by handling scaling for you, once you write to their APIs and give them your code [another issue]). Not everyone wants to be an Erlang expert and roll their own scalable code.. (some people just want to be able to build a cool popular app and outsource worries about scaling).

Is there anything significant Hypercard did that you can't do in flash these days?