I built http://www.sparkmuse.com and http://thesparkfoundry.com on AppEngine. You'll have to write a little more code to handle not having a RDMS, but that's only if you need joins.
Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
21–30 of 48 posts
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#22I use App Engine a ton. I won't try to list all the positives.
Of course "is it flexible enough to run big, serious projects" depends on the requirements of your big serious projects. Feel free to get more specific here, or (better yet) in the google app engine forums.
One thing not mentioned yet that is a legitimate concern applying generally to PaaS offerings including App Engine - that is vendor lock-in. There are some way to address that including choice of apis and frameworks and also projects like AppScale and TyphoonAE.
There is much to evaluate when considering App Engine for your projects. the flexibility of the platform from a technical perspective is one of things.
Also note, watch closely the changes that are coming in pricing and the way that Google is offering the service. You don't want to get caught evaluating the App Engine of 2010 for 2012.
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#23App Engine has a lot of really awesome features going for it. There are some pains for sure, but not the ones you find people typically griping about. The datastore and all of that aren't a big deal. What's annoying is the lack of library compatibility, and no real SSL suport. Having access to a relatively small subset of available libraries for Java/Python sucks, each time you find a library you'll have to find out…
> The datastore and all of that aren't a big deal.
Why do you say that?
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#24Windsoc uses App Engine for our Unified Social API, and while it has many benefits, we've always had our minds on how to move off of it someday. SSL is a big issue for us, and another is the support model (which should be changing soon from what I've seen).
So what we have now is a product that runs both on App Engine and on DotCloud. Since DotCloud is awesome, too, and we know that we can talk to a specific person when something goes wrong, it's currently a front-runner for us. We're also looking at Joyent, too, as opposed to EC2.
But even if we switch large parts of our product to somewhere else, I wouldn't be surprised if we still used App Engine for some things.
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#25I've used App Engine for web projects and backend server for Android apps. My web TV site http://www.topchan.tv, and the webpage snapshotting site http://www.previouslook.com are in App Engine.
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#26I've only just started using it (this week) as an excuse to get my feet wet with Go. It seems easy enough to get started, things are well documented so far though I've admittedly only touched about half the packages.
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#27App Engine has a lot of really awesome features going for it. There are some pains for sure, but not the ones you find people typically griping about. The datastore and all of that aren't a big deal. What's annoying is the lack of library compatibility, and no real SSL suport. Having access to a relatively small subset of available libraries for Java/Python sucks, each time you find a library you'll have to find out…
There are ways to hack around the lack of SSL on third party domains with Ajax, but yeah it's pretty insane that they still haven't got that in place.
Completely agree that it's a much needed feature. We've worked around that by setting up an nginx server in AWS which has proxies to the https://*.appspot.com name. So it's still SSL all the way, but we just didn't want appspot.com as the URL we gave out.
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#28It would be great if Google would allow for managing of a custom reverse proxy with unique IP into an app.
This could solve the naked domain and SSL issues and enable other cool customizations.
Has anyone done this themselves? Just put Varnish or Nginx in front of GAE?
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#29I built http://www.onesong.me in appengine using the java playframework, and I quite like what I get for free.
Re: Ask HN: Who's using Google App Engine?
#30Optimizely. I can't remember other big ones but there more. App engine has proven to be serving millions of requests per day without any issue. There are some case studies around, also some web caches hosted on app engine.