Hi Padraig,
Based on my own experiences the platform is at a level of maturity
just below my tolerance threshold. As examples, getting large amounts
of data into the system is currently quite difficult, partially to do
with limits on request size (I'm sure I read this somewhere but can't
find it now), and execution time placed on scripts.
I tried building a simplistic OPML application using AppEngine, that
given an URL like:
http://some-app.blogspot.com/http://some.url/my.opml
Would produce something like planetplanet.org's output. This seemed
like a perfect little demonstration application (combining bits of the
web, chunks of XML, and generating a single HTML page), except the
only URL fetching capability in AppEngine is limited to a single
request at a time, and apparently counts towards the execution time of
the request that caused the fetch.
So even for the simplest application I could think of, taking my OPML
file of around 400 feeds, and generating a Planet style output, would
likely have required all kinds of hacks that made the web browser
refresh the page until all the feeds had been downloaded (which would
have taken a very, very long time if fetched one at a time).
As for frameworks, you can't really avoid using the AppEngine
framework. I didn't get around to using Django but it should be pretty
much the same as using it in a normal application. The only thing that
changes (as I understand it) is the base class used when defining your
models/.
That experience, and going by today's news of a datastore bug causing
a large proportion of AppEngine requests to fail, I'm personally
leaving AppEngine alone for 6 months or so until the really rough bits
have been fixed.
Otherwise, it looks like an amazing platform. It's just pretty limited
right now. (Something like a parallel HTTP fetch API or background
processing will probably arrive sooner rather than later. It's a
rather gaping hole in the featureset).
David
On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 3:41 PM, Padraig Kitterick
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> I'm starting to develop an app on Google app engine which is essentially
> like del.icio.us but for other kinds of information useful to academics.
> Nothing too complicated but I'd be really interested to hear what people
> have to say about the best way to approach a new Google app when
> starting from scratch. Is it preferable to use Django over Google's
> basic webapp framework? Is this only really useful if you have Django
> experience, or is webapp very limited in comparison? I tried watching
> Guido's presentation on Django with app engine but got the impression
> that it's still pretty hacky to use, and I'm not clear how the Django
> system ties in with using google accounts, etc. Anyone have positive
> experiences with this?
>
> Padraig
>
> >
>
--
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
— Einstein
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