Goodbye, Google App Engine

#1

Post by vrruiz » Sun, Nov 21, 2010, 9:17 PM UTC

Carlos Ble says: "Choosing GAE as the platform four our project is a mistake which cost I estimate in about 15,000€. Considering it's been my money, it is a "bit" painful."

Goodbye, Google App Engine
carlosble.com

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#2

Post by checker659 » Sun, Nov 21, 2010, 9:43 PM UTC

#11 isn't true. Since a recent update, you can now retrieve more than 1000 results in a single call.

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#3

Post by arfrank » Sun, Nov 21, 2010, 9:47 PM UTC

#3 isn't true for taskqueue tasks or cron jobs anymore, the deadline is now 10 minutes ( actually will be once 1.4.0 SDK is released in about a week or so )

Also at first glance there is no indication of how the author got to a value of 15k€. My best guess, and a guess at that, is that they put the value of a line of code at 1€ and had to migrate 15k lines, but I hope there is more scientific than than.

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#4

Post by sahillavingia » Sun, Nov 21, 2010, 9:49 PM UTC

checker659 wrote: post #2

#11 isn't true. Since a recent update, you can now retrieve more than 1000 results in a single call.

No, it is true. After the recent update you could use a combination of queries and offsets to retrieve more than 1000 results. To get 1001 results or more you need multiple calls.

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#5

Post by Tichy » Sun, Nov 21, 2010, 9:57 PM UTC

arfrank wrote: post #3

#3 isn't true for taskqueue tasks or cron jobs anymore, the deadline is now 10 minutes ( actually will be once 1.4.0 SDK is released in about a week or so ) Also at first glance there is no indication of how the author got to a value of 15k€. My best guess, and a guess at that, is that they put the value of a line of code at 1€ and had to migrate 15k lines, but I hope there is more scientific than than.

He also mentioned that working around GAE set them back 5 months.

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#6

Post by mark_l_watson » Sun, Nov 21, 2010, 9:57 PM UTC

A useful article for people to read before using AppEngine. I only use AppEngine for my own projects, so far no jobs for customers.

I was aware of most of the limitations of AppEngine that the author of the article mentions after just a few hours of experimenting with AppEngine. Now, AppEngine now no longer gives me many problems.

I think the lesson is to do a lot of experiments before committing to technologies.

I don't use the Python SDK. Most of what I have done has been using Java (but with small Clojure and JRuby experiments). One thing that helped was to start using Objectify instead of JDO (as an example).

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#7

Post by jasonkester » Sun, Nov 21, 2010, 9:58 PM UTC

I feel your pain, brother. I went through all of this a few years back. AppEngine was still pretty new back then, so it all seemed like things that they would fix before long. But it sure didn't feel ready for production.

I'm actually quite surprised that all those same limitations are still in place after all this time. I guess if I took a minute I could come up with an issue or two I had back then that has been fixed since, but his list of show stoppers are all things that people were complaining about, and that Google gave the impression of being on top of.

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#8

Post by csytan » Sun, Nov 21, 2010, 10:07 PM UTC

It sounds like a lot of his problems stem from the use of Django. I've tried it before, and believe me, Django absolutely sucks on Appengine.

First off, you have a full featured framework which was designed for SQL relational databases. Many of Django's features either have to be given up, or are monkey-patched beyond belief to get partial functionality. Not to mention quite a few Django apps use database features which are simply not supported by BigTable.

Secondly, Django is not exactly the smallest framework, so loading time can be quite expensive and will be tacked on to every cold start.

All that being said, I've had good success with the tornado framework. It's fast, well written, and thoughtfully designed. Check out my profile if you want to see some examples of apps written with tornado + GAE.

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#9

Post by ajessup » Sun, Nov 21, 2010, 10:10 PM UTC

mark_l_watson wrote: post #6

A useful article for people to read before using AppEngine. I only use AppEngine for my own projects, so far no jobs for customers. I was aware of most of the limitations of AppEngine that the author of the article mentions after just a few hours of experimenting with AppEngine. Now, AppEngine now no longer gives me many problems. I think the lesson is to do a lot of experiments before committing to technologies. I d…

Can definitely advocate Objectify. It's much nicer to work with and if you're working with Google Web Toolkit it is also GWT-serializable, so you can use the same objects in your DAOs and GWT UI.

Re: Goodbye, Google App Engine

#10

Post by robinhouston » Sun, Nov 21, 2010, 10:10 PM UTC

sahillavingia wrote: post #4

checker659 wrote: post #2

#11 isn't true. Since a recent update, you can now retrieve more than 1000 results in a single call.

No, it is true. After the recent update you could use a combination of queries and offsets to retrieve more than 1000 results. To get 1001 results or more you need multiple calls.

I am sure you are mistaken.

The reason I'm sure is that I just tried it:

  entities = data.MyModel.all().fetch(1010)
  print len(entities) # Prints 1010

Then I thought that perhaps you meant the limitation still exists in the low-level datastore API — and it's worked around by the Model interface making multiple calls to the low-level API — but that's not true either:

  from google.appengine.api import datastore
  entities = datastore.Query("MyModel").Get(1010)
  print len(entities) # Still prints 1010

So: what do you mean?