Development of collaborative applications on the cloud

Before cloud computing, a substantial investment was required to move an idea for an application from design to development, and then to go live. A high fixed cost was incurred for servers and storage, space and staff. Now with cloud vendors readily providing computing resources through cloud services, any individual with an idea has the resources available to create a web application and share it with the world, easily allowing thousands of users to enjoy his product. Cloud computing has completely changed web development. From this project, the author hopes to demonstrate that any individual can be a web entrepreneur with the cloud platform. For the self-starting and enterprising undergraduate interested in technology, cloud computing and web programming should be an essential part of their tool kit. The objective of this project was to develop a web application running on Google App Engine, a cloud service. This application allows a group of users collaborate and will be able to easily scale up to support hundreds of users, a feature of the cloud. The web application is a simple project management tool that provides user interactive discussion boards, to-do lists, and task assignment to other collaborators. The web application also provides a repository in the cloud for users to store and backup their data. In this project, the author has no need to maintain any servers or incur any cost to get the project application live on the web. The author has successfully developed a web application, named Cuppage that is completely running on Google’s cloud. Users can log in with their Google accounts and create multiple projects. Other users can participate in live projects and work together in teams. Cuppage, running on Google App Engine, is now live on the web and is able to support up to 1 GB of storage and 500 million page views every month, free of charge.Bachelor of Engineerin