[Python-talk] Google app engine

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Wed, Apr 09, 2008 at 09:46:58AM -0400, Kent Johnson wrote:
> Ted Roche wrote:
> > This is a very intriguing offering. I'd like 
> > to hear the opinions of others (Kent? Cole?) as they try it out.
> 
> I think it is pretty exciting myself. The biggest issues I have seen:
> - vendor lock-in - apps written for GAE will not run anywhere else, you 
> have to code to the Google APIs

How so? I'll admit that the Fetch API is somewhat esoteric, and the
datastore is somewhat limiting, but not painfully so. It runs WSGI
applications, so any app that's WSGI can be made to work reasonably
easily. Additionally, you can 'just write Django' and do pretty well,
from my reading of the docs: again, you have to do some work to 'fix'
your data model, but if it's written that way from the beginning, it
wouldn't be too bad to go *away* from GOogle (it's just going *to*
google that's hard.) 

> - datastore - the datastore is based on Google's BigTable. It is not a 
> relational database. It does support foreign keys but not joins. To me 
> this suggests that using a complex data model might be cumbersome and 
> inefficient.

Possibly, but I think that limited datastore APIs are not entirely
different from the step from SQL->ORM: you abandon a bit of flexibility
for a lot of benefit, and for many applications, I think that the same
thing applies: BigTable hits a fair number of use cases without being
difficult.   

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer