Site now on AppEngine

It's been a long time coming, but recently I've been learning a lot about Google AppEngine.

It's been a very interesting journey too. Not only have I been learning Python but I've also started a new interest in schemaless datastores (key/value stores, whatever you want to call them).

I even gave a short and unprepared presentation to Wellington PerlMongers about one called Redis. That one looks my favourite so far but yeah, my interest started with AppEngine's Datastore.

Schemaless Datastores

So far I'm enjoying playing with AppEngine's datastore though I find there are some things which are quite finicky about it, mainly due to the Python classes that are being used to help stick data in and get it back out again. Migrations of datastore entities seem to be difficult or as yet some of the techniques to do it are unknown to me (though I have started a list of techniques to help).

Otherwise, once you get your head around not only the data being schemaless but duplicating data so that you can get faster speed and more scaleability, then you're on to a winner. Relations like in a tradition RDBMS are also out of the window though you can reference other objects so it's not completely gone.

Things about AppEngine

Again, so far most things about AppEngine I like, though there seems to be a few things which are harder than necessary.

I managed to find a peculiar bug in AppEngine the other day but still no answer on the Google Group. This is particularly weird as far as I can tell.

And of course, the perenial problem that if something is wrong with AppEngine, all of the developers at Google seem to disappear. And then appear with "Nothing was wrong". Whilst I understand why they do it, it's not great customer relations.

Yet at the same time, the pull of running a site on someone else's servers, that they administer and you don't have to do lots of SysAdmin work, is too great to be ignored. As to whether I'd use it for Mission Critical Applications yet, I don't know.

Overall, it's been a fun (if longer than expected) experience but I'm happy with it so far.

Finally, the CMS/Blog I have written is called Lollysite and check out the project home on Gitorious.

Labels: appengine, python, perlmongers, redis, google

Inserted: 2009-12-06 05:18 (7 months, 3 weeks ago)

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