Google App Engine

Today I launched my first Google App Engine site Ross Gload Is Everywhere. So far I’m pretty impressed with what Google has to offer. The coding part is plan old Python with some basic framework tools. The ORM is usable, more on that in a minute and the development environment is what you would except. The shinny star IMHO is deployment and management. With a simple command in Terminal your fresh code is deployed and running live. No messing with SSH, version control, stopping or restarting services. I dig it. Plus they give you nice dashboard to view log files, request information and lot more. Really other hosting companies could learn a thing or two from the dashboard.

Lets take a minute to mention the ORM and data store. I come from doing mostly Django development these days. While the ORM is close its no cigar. I understand why so many basic things are left out. I mean they do give you a turn key “highly scalable” data store. It’s just some simple things are annoying. For instance on the main page of Ross Gload Is Everywhere I display a random entry. This is not a basic query, you need to store a attribute that is set to a random float between 0 and 1. Then you use that attribute to query for 1 record closest to your another random float.

class Object(db.Model):
    rand = db.FloatProperty()

    def put(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.rand = random.random()
        super(Object, self).put(*args, **kwargs)

object = Object.all().filter('rand > ', random.random()).order('rand').get()

Seems silly to me, maybe there is a better way i dunno. Over all I think App Engine is great for super simple sites but I wouldn’t bank a big project on it. At least not right now. Try it out and see what you think for your self.