After writing a post that has recently sparked some controversy, I felt that it was only proper to offer up some more observations about the way various languages perform at a baseline (yes – read hello world style applications) on Google AppEngine. The primary purpose of both this post, and my previous post on comparing Google AppEngine language performance is to show that while Google offer Java on AppEngine, the performance of Java Applications for low-traffic (or growing) sites may not be what you are expecting on day one.
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posted on the April 25th, 2010 4 Comments »
I am quite convinced that Google AppEngine is a very significant piece of “cloud computing” technology. More than other cloud components, it has been designed to scale from small, low request count websites to the big suckers. That is, until you come across your first Loading Request in the world of the AppEngine Java (and friends – Scala, Groovy, etc).
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posted on the April 20th, 2010 14 Comments »
Google’s AppEngine is not a CDN (or Content Delivery Network).
How do I know this? Well I’m in a process of setting up a new site in anticipation of going out and doing my own thing (nothing finalized quite yet). While not really the point of this article it was the trigger for investigating AppEngine performance with regards to load times of resource files (images, css, etc).
While the results aren’t suprising, it definitely highlights the continued need for a CDN (even if you read the occasional post that tries to tell you that using AppEngine as a CDN is possible).
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posted on the March 2nd, 2010 8 Comments »
Well it’s 2010, and I definitely had a distractable end to 2009 (with a distinct lack of blogging). So to kick off 2010, I thought I’d start trying to get a few of the “low hanging fruit” ideas that I’ve had over the last six months written and working.
The first of those will be an experiment using Google’s AppEngine as a front-end proxy to a less robust website, hosted on low-cost hosting. Whilst not sure, I’ve got a feeling that I’ll be able to give my self-hosted wordpress blog a layer of resilience with some app-engine mem-caching goodness.
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posted on the January 10th, 2010 1 Comment »
Google’s App Engine has some scheduled maintenance pretty soon (June 10th (Wednesday) at 4 PM Pacific Time). During this time, both datastore writes and the memcache will be disabled. Now, I have no problem with this – all systems need to have maintenance completed on them, and in general some of this maintenance will involve service disruption.
What I do have a problem with is the suggested way of dealing with the outage. In the scheduled maintenance announcement instructions are given on how a CapabilityDisabledError exception can be intercepted and gracefully dealt with (example code from the announcement below):
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posted on the June 10th, 2009 1 Comment »
Django is a pretty interesting looking web application framework available for python, and a lot of the inspiration for Google AppEngine (in terms of the python implementation at least) have apparently come out of use of Django. Presently AppEngine has out of the box support for Django 0.96 but if you want to get up and running with the latest stable version of Django you have to jump through a few hoops.
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posted on the May 27th, 2009 No Comments »
Tonight I have had a win. It’s a small win, but a win nonetheless. I have uploaded a small application which is making use of my new GAE tools library. The purpose behind this library is to make application development in the google appengine even more enjoyable. At this stage a python version of the library has been released, and I don’t currently have plans to build a java equivalent as I’m finding quite a pleasant language to develop in (not a language I have coded much in before).
The GAE tools library started it’s life with me calling it “Twawler” or basically a twitter search wrapper, but it grew to include other functions inside the library the meant it deserved a more generic name. The high level functions are are described below:
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posted on the May 20th, 2009 No Comments »
Really struggling at the moment to make a choice between whether to go with Java or Python in the GAE. Either seem like a pretty solid choice from the reading I’ve done, and I’m comfortable with but not deeply skilled in either language. My great fear is (being distractable and all) is that I will start to implement a project in one, and then realise I really should have been working with the other.
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posted on the May 3rd, 2009 No Comments »
For anyone who is investigating using Google’s AppEngine at the moment, would be well aware that whilst it is pretty amazing (as I indicated in a previous post) it does have it’s limitations.
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posted on the March 22nd, 2009 2 Comments »
