

TyphoonAE: a new Google App Engine stack - shykes
http://code.google.com/p/typhoonae/

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koenbok
I'm waiting for the first hosting company to offer a drop-in replacement for
AppEngine. It should be easy to compete on support with Google, and there are
tons of AppEngine applications out there that can turn into big successes.

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sidmitra
The appengine to me 'personally' has always felt too restrictive and suitable
for pet projects than full scale apps.

But then again, i might be stuck in a "relational" mindset.

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koenbok
Maybe, maybe not. We just wrote a big app (enstore.com) on top of it without
too much problems. It's another way of thinking, but I actually started to
like a restrictive datastore with very consistent characteristics. Now if they
only can get it up to speed again (<http://bit.ly/as4sij>) :-)

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iampims
Enstore is running on Django, right? Did you run into any gae specific issues?

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mbenjaminsmith
I used App Engine for over a year on different projects and ended up leaving
it. My first reaction to TyphoonAE was 'cool', because it's exactly the sort
of thing I wanted to see back in those days so I could get over the sense of
lock-in. If I knew there was an easy way out I wouldn't have to think about
it.

But if you consider what this project actually means... if it's about
providing a way out while maintaining compatibility then all it really does is
give people a reason to stay on App Engine. Are the developers cool with that?
Or is this an intermediate system that allows you to migrate an active project
away and then expand it beyond AE's limitations?

If you're ok with the limitations inherent in AE then it makes sense to stay
there given the fairly high level of reliability and very low cost. If you
need to move beyond AE's limitations then you should just port your app to
another platform. Given the amount of Java/Python frameworks out there it's
not really a big deal to find a better platform without having to start
completely from scratch.

Another issue is that it's not just finding a compatible db but being able to
get your data moved while maintaining the current key/id/parent/etc
relationships. If you're like me, you probably used id/key lookups extensively
because they're faster.

I'm curious how they'll address the actual migration issues beyond api/module
compatibility.

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util
Could you talk about some of the limitations that led you away from AppEngine?

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mbenjaminsmith
I'm working on an app now that uses PIL to create some fairly complex
composite graphics with serial numbers printed on them. Can't do that on App
Engine.

Their version of PIL is buggy. I had to use composite() to do crop() in order
to get rid of black lines on the edges of images (seemingly random, couldn't
get repeatable results).

The datastore is slow and requires a lot of planning to do even basic stuff.
You also have to manually memcache everything to speed things up.

Hard 10 second limit on db queries and a 30 second limit on requests. There's
a famous bug that kills db queries randomly. I'm not sure they ever fixed it
but there's a monkey patch floating around that keeps trying until the time
limit is reached.

Deploys timeout constantly. A one click deploy isn't that attractive if it
takes over a minute to complete.

Mail handling is terrible and only got introduced (inbound) after I had been
using it for a long time. When I say terrible I mean buggy and unpatched. You
have to write your own attachment handling to work around it.

If you don't have a heavily trafficked app, your app 'goes to sleep' often
(gets unloaded from memory). There's a pretty long wait when it fires up
again.

When they (or you) do have a problem, there's really no connection to support.
There's a group but you have to wait for a response.

There are a lot more but I can't remember all of them at the moment. I've
since just moved to a vanilla Django deploy. I would never go back.

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util
:-( Sorry to hear about all this. I'm still tempted to use it but will be more
prepared to be disappointed.

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mark_l_watson
This looks pretty cool. I am installing it right now to kick the tires. I use
and like AppEngine, but another framework that would support migration away
from AppEngine seems like a good idea to me.

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TobiasR
If you need help installing it, feel free to post any questions to
<http://groups.google.com/group/typhoonae>

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eitland
Google should be happy too, as this removes vendor lock in, which I guess is
one of the last barriers to App Engine adoption for a lot of customers.

