Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Google App Engine Work !!!

After hard work and many workarounds I managed to run my first Google App Engine application !!!

And it works great, The performances are amazing, I have more than 10,000 rows in my tables and selecting the rows takes few milliseconds.

I manage to find workaround for the unicode problem by not writing unicodes in the Goole App Engine datastore, I also managed to find workaround for the bulk upload problem by loading the entities one by one and not 10 entities at a time.

So regarding my last post which suggest not to use Google App Engine, I change my mind, You can use it but you would need to work very hard to make it work.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Google App Engine and GWT

First there was GWT - Google Web Toolkit a very nice framework to develop Ajax applications in Java language which then translate to JavaScript, It worked with Tomcat Web Server. Then Google decide to release Google App Engine a service which provide the ability to develop applications in Python language and deploy them on their servers for free and provide datastore which is like DB to store data.

It seems like their is no syncrhonization at all with the two groups GWT and Google App Engine, once Google goes for Java and then for Python, Is there any direction to which Google wants to go to?

In their website they claim that they choosed Pyhton because it is secure language, There is no more secure lagnuage than Java, How would GWT developers would deploy their applications on Google App Engine, would they need now to convert their code to Python? I really confused

Friday, April 25, 2008

Why not using Google App Engine

After worked several days with Google App Engine, I was realy dissapointed, It seems that since it has just released and it is in "Preview Release" it contains some bugs and since Google choose Python as the programming language it make it hard to develop for programmers which don't know well Python, Here are the problems that I come with

  • Python is VERY hard language to develop applications which required Unicode, Maybe for english applications its not so bad language but when you try writing something which is not english you need to find yourself using decode, encode, unicode and other awful methos.
  • It seems that urlfetch method which retrieve data from other urls doesn't support unicode
  • I tried to upload my datastore to the application server, when I do it locally it works, however when I try to upload the datastore remotly on Google Servers it fails.
  • Datastore also doesn't support unicode characters, everything has to be in english
  • Sometimes after uploading the application to the Google Servers it says error 500, However the application works just find locally
  • Python language is the only programming language I know which requires not using Tabs inside the source code and it doesn't use { and } characters to define block but rather it looks on where the line begins. There are much more advance programming languages like Java which could fit more to be used with Google App Engine

In summary I think that I would wait some time before Google App Engine would have more stable versions.

Monday, April 21, 2008

Working with Google App Engine

I just got today invitation to try Google App Engine,
It seems that I'm one of the lucky 10,000 people that got invitation to try it.

Well first I had to admit that I don't know shit about Phyton, Google App Engine is based about Phyton language, However it seems that it is not hard to learn this langauge once you know Php, Java or other programming language.

The big advantage of Google App Engine, is that you don't have to take care about all installing and deploying applications, taking care for performance or load balancing, you get all this things for Free!!!

It seems that it is pretty easy to develop applications using Google App Engine, you just need to install phyton, and Google App Engine SDK, and thats all.

Then you are your phyton application file, and you can test it localy by running GAE (Goolge App Engine) locally.

Once you finished writing you application you just upload it to the Google Server.

The biggest advanatge of GAE in my opinion it is ability to store data and retrive data from the database using GQL Google Query Language which is just like SQL but a bit different, This allow the application writing highly scalabe SQL selects.

Once I would finish writing my application I would publish it here.
Please comment if you have any questions.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Google App Engine

Google announced yesterday about their ambitious project "Google App Engine",

The idea for Google is why we should spend so much effort developing applications? Lets make developers outside Google develop applicatons for us. This is the same idea like "YouTube" the users upload the videos for Google.

Each user gets free 500MB of persistent storage and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month.

Don't hurry to register since the project is limited to the first 10,000 developers, And there are more than 10,000 developers which already registered.

When I tried to check the App Gallery all the applications returned the following error after trying to login: "The requested page is expiered".


Google App Engine

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