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Java on Google App Engine

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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.