A few thoughts from my first test of Google App Engine.
My goal was to put up a prototype java web app for pushing email alerts based on RSS content (more to come on the full idea). Unfortunately, it took much longer than I expected to get things going (longer than my web app protoype took to write) – leaving me feeling a bit disappointed. On the up side, the app has been running quite well for about a week now.
pos:
- free for small tests
- includes java hosting (my host didn’t)
- nice that most things just worked (see below) – account, eclipse plugin, local test, deploy, running app, stats/logs
- promisses to be automatically scalable – very nice
- Built in access to Cron, Memcache, and even Big Table / MapReduce type services
neg:
- sandboxed java environment
- harder to debug – especially libraries which behave differently in sandbox
- logging – not as stupidly simple as it should have been out of the box
- had to roll back to more basic rss event library – due to lack of support for threading
- testing email alerts didn’t work locally – no way to configure in eclipse plugin
Thoughts? Please share your comments below.
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In the last 6 months I’ve spent a lot more time building systems on top of app engine. Overall, my experience has been great. Checkout Map(Reduce) Analytics on Google AppEngine and stay tuned for more app engine related posts.