
Is Google App Engine successful? - peter123
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19413_3-10148273-240.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
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koenbok
Well, the platform also seriously lacks some stuff to start developing
anything serious on it like: being able to buy more quota, fulltext search, a
weird 1000 result limit and most importantly bulk data editing/backup/restore.

But we host our <http://www.versionsapp.com> site on it and that works
extremely well: <http://www.madebysofa.com/#blog/appengine_hosting>

~~~
anewaccountname
Gorgeous site.

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bdr
Google has failed to execute well on GAE. What's the point of automatic
scalability if you have usage caps? Why has it taken so long to get a payment
plan? The platform isn't the right choice for anyone yet, and it's taking too
long to get there.

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joshsharp
Agreed. It's not a lack of evangelism, it's arbitrary usage caps and result
limits that make GAE a pain to use effectively.

Although I suppose you could say this means it also suffers from anti-
evangelism, because after using it for a project I warned everyone else that
was interested, "It's not ready, don't bother."

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bprater
The lack of any real evangelism is hurting App Engine.

If Google was doing a better job highlighting companies or projects using the
service, posting interesting articles, actually improving the service based on
feedback -- they might have gained more traction by now.

They are wholly inconsistent, the last blog post was a month ago.

You can't just launch a service and wait for ... magic. You'd think that Goog
would understand this.

App Engine isn't dead by far, but it could be a much bigger player in the
cloud space if someone at Google would wake up.

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csytan
Instead of following the blog, you might want to check out the appengine
group: <http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine>

I'm actually quite impressed with their work. The platform (despite its
limitations) is extremely easy to work on and they seem to be implementing
features & fixing bugs at a good pace.

They also hold a bi-monthly IRC chat with developers.

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ChaitanyaSai
I built an app on it a while back <http://gflix.appspot.com> to go with the
Netflixprize competition. While the inability to bulk-upload data (without
workarounds), and the data size limits are rather annoying, it does work well
and looks promising, especially given that it is only a few months old.

I think the primary advantage is being able to harness Google's architecture
for zippy data retrieval, but they then handicap it by putting limits on how
much data you can dump. They probably will offer a tiered pricing structure to
allow massive dataset uploads.

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amichail
I've built <http://readmytweets.com> using the GAE. Even though it has
problems (e.g., no distributed transactions), I still predict that GAE will be
very successful.

But that's a problem in a way: your competition is about to increase several
orders of magnitude as server cost goes to zero. Think of all those high
school and university students who will be attempting their own web startups.

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flashgordon
well its too early a call, but one thing is it is not unsuccessful...

you are all aware with the limitations (eg comet support and cron jobs being
the biggest), but it is still not bad for quick prototyping and even releasing
sites with medium levels of complexity (ive written a simple chess site -
wizchess.appspot.com - does the basic game play and all but lots lots lots of
polish required)...

but it certainly goes with google's philosopy of "fail often, fail early" (or
the other way around).. essentially they are developing the api in tangent
with developers who require new features though it has been slow late i
think...

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andr
I think it is, but not for the reason you think. Google is slowly porting a
lot of their own applications to GAE and those savings alone make it worth it
even if it never gains major market share with the outside world.

