

How App Engine served the Humble Indie Bundle - ordinaryman
http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/06/how-app-engine-served-humble-indie.html

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SingAlong
I just came across a problem a few minutes ago. Getting appengine sdk working
on my Ubuntu 10.04. Most distros seem to have removed python 2.5 from their
repo. And unfortunately it's not possible to replace /usr/bin/python with 2.5
instead of 2.6 coz, Ubuntu seems to use python to check if a shell cmd exists.
So I had to switch back to 2.6 after I had symlinked 2.5 at /usr/bin/python

Read an issue on the google code site where a lot of developers are requesting
for python 2.6 support. And the appengine team replies that they do have it on
their list but not top priority.

So if your OS's repo doesn't have 2.5, you'll have a bit of a problem. Django
version is 1.1 on appengine. Still the trivial 1mb app limit.

Whatever happens, i still like appengine for it's ease of deployment of python
apps. Appengine seems to be for python what Heroku is for ruby apps.

P.S: If anybody has a solution to 2.5 python on ubuntu 10.04...

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cmelbye
Python might have something Ike Ruby's rvm utility. If you're unfamiliar, rvm
stands for Ruby Version Manager, and it allows you to have multiple versions
of Ruby installed. When you want to use a certain version, you run "rvm use
ruby-1.8" (for example), and it switches, to that version in the current shell
session.

~~~
ovi256
It's python_select on Mac OS X, installed with macports like this : sudo port
install python_select.

I'm not sure if it's a Mac or port thing. BTW, there's a gcc_select too. For
the more hardcore amongst us :)

~~~
SingAlong
Yes, just found out that python_select is Mac-only.

There's something called virtualenv available on easy_install. I'm going to
try it now and I'll get back.

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Tichy
I like App Engine, too, however, I always worry about the "hot cache" problem
(or how to call it?): if your app doesn't get a request for a while, it will
be cycled out of the "active" state, and the next quest will have a long delay
for booting the app again. Especially people who used Java VM languages (ie
Clojure, RoR) have complained about the issue.

I wonder if the situation has improved in the last couple of months? One
proposed solution is to have a recurring task trigger requests, but that seems
like a wasteful hack. Plus, it would be unreliable as it is not known how App
Engine decided internally when to "unload" an app.

~~~
cmelbye
I think Google is planning on doing some sort of "reserved instance" type
thing, where you can pay $x/month to keep y number of instances running.

~~~
snprbob86
Yup, it's on their roadmap:
<http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html>

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Raphael
I'm guessing the multi-hundred megabyte games weren't served from App Engine.

