My strong suggestion at this stage to anyone considering GAE for a
production, business use DO NOT USE GAE.

GAE has significant flaws; these are basic flaws and the time spent
writing a work-around to these problems is far too great for very
short internet times.

Let me add some basic very necessary items (I am going to do a blog
entry as well on these issues)

1. No Bulk Delete/Update: If you ever create a one-to-many or many-to-
many relation; you will inevitably come to a point when you have to
remove an object. In doing so, if that object was being referred by
400 objects; you have to read, change and write those objects back.
GAE does not allow you to change that this many objects. A user might
leave your service, you would want to remove all their data or mark it
as unavailable. A large tweet comes in, 20,000 followers need to be
updated. A group gets deleted, all the contacts referring to that
group need to be updated.

2. Random Datastore timeouts: The most annoying issue is that a single
object read/writeback can sometimes be <1000mc or can be more than
5000mc. This random behavior cripples the app and makes it impossible
to optimize

3. The Google Quota Bad: if your app exceeded it's short-term quota
the punishment is very excessive: a 24 hour ban. This is the worst
possible action you can take on a dot com: You take it offline.

4. No sorting: When using lists, inequalities etc you can't sort on
multiple properties. You just can't.

5. Limited Datastore functionality and very poor workarounds: Want to
use OR? Sorry, you can't. What to simulate OR in memory? Sorry, your
process will be killed either because of high quota or long response
time. Even if you get your app to do it in memory, it is a ticking
timebomb, it will explode when more users come in. Very unsalable in
that regard. Want to use two inequalities? Sorry.

6. Magic Exploding Indexes: Yes, Lists are a great concept but they
can cut you in half. You cannot mix multiple lists in a single WHERE
clause, or suffer explosion. You cannot create too many (20< if that
sounds like too many) indexes, you will have them explode. Lists are a
double-edged sword which cut you a lot more than help you.

7. In 2008, GAE keeps on making you reinvent the wheel: As a
webapplication/startup, the most important thing is feature velocity.
How fast can you deliver features? With GAE, some very common
functionality has to be reinvented over and over. To the point where
it consumes so much time that the cost-time benefits are completely
lost.

8. No HTTPS. Toy apps aside (apologies to wordle and buddypoke), if
google wants serious applications it NEEDS to add HTTPS support. In
this day and age of trust building, colored address-bar to peace of
mind; you cannot leave this feature out.

9. Dev Server is broken. The local test server doesn't work on half
our development systems. Its broken. Its results do not reflect the
behavior of GAE itself. It won't do simple things like load static
files.

10. No support: Ofcourse, this is a preview, if you get in a mess and
need a Googler's attention; it's up to their discretion and leisure
time do they respond to you. Nothing is binding at this time; you're
not paying them anything yet.

11. GAE Admin is NO replacement for the Django Admin. But that's how
it is portrayed in the GAE's documentation. You think that Google's
Admin is a replacement for django's admin. Boy, are you wrong. The GAE
admin is a very limited app; on dev server it will keep throwing
errors at you. The app looks more like a backend for programmers where
as the whole point of the django admin was to allow for "admin USERS"
to access it and make changes to the data. In its current form, it
can't be used by non-tech-savy users.

12. Very slow GAE upgrades: The GAE team is very slow on introducing
changes to appengine. For something that's targeted for release by the
end of the year, this is not at all going to the pace required.

13. No roadmap shared: We'd all shutup on the features if Google said
"we're working on it, it'll be out"; Google won't even say it's
working on it or that there is work being done

I'm a big fan of Django and when Google announced a scalable web
application framework with Django, I was thrilled! But I have been
very disappointed. This "preview" is not up to the level of Google's
"previews". Google has shown us that it has high quality standards so
much so that we trust it with our private email, docs etc whereas all
these services are in Beta.

My software shop had a team of 6 GAE developers, but until GAE can get
it's act together, we're pulling away from it. The time and money
wasted on getting simple things to work is atrocious and the light at
the end of the tunnel is just way too far away.

WS
-Nash

On Sep 30, 2:21 pm, "Feris Thia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I understand that GAE is still in preview used only, but I just wonder if
> anyone has used it in any semi or full production ? And with how many page
> hits / visitors per day ?
>
> --
> Thanks & Best Regards,
>
> Feris Thia
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