Before I begin this new project in earnest I thought I’d take sometime to introduce my basic setup. I am of course using Eclipse as my development environment along with the Google App Engine plugin. The project itself will use Google’s High Replication Datastore (HRD) but I have switched off the Datanucleus JDO/JPA access to the Datastore. More about this in a moment.
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For “suits”, Excel is the gaffer tape of the business world. For a long time Apache Ant was the gaffer tape of the Java development world. It was great and I actually looked forward to writing yet another build.xml file. I did switch to maven for a while, but my heart wasn’t in it. Since switching to Google App Engine and Amazon Web Services, I’ve found that I haven’t touched a build.xml file for years (CruiseControl not withstanding). When you don’t need the gaffer tape anymore, it means that someone has fixed the problem.
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I’ve got so many personal projects at the moment, I’m a little bit overloaded. It’s time to commit and follow through. Late last night I committed to doing two things. Firstly, get one project off the ground and secondly to blog about it. More about the project in the next few posts and probably more importantly, why I’ve decided to give Google App Engine one last go. I still have a number of apps running on Google App Engine and they continue to tick over, but it’s time to do a full run down of the benefits and costs. This project is going to help me do that and hopefully provide some valuable feedback to the wider Google App Engine developer community. The project will touch on most of the GAE API (Java only I’m afraid) and will integrate with a number of external services, including Facebook and Paypal. It’s time for me to find out if GAE has legs.
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I’ve been away from the blog for quite sometime. It would seem that I need to take 6 months (or more) to re-energise my blogging batteries. My thanks to all who continued to read in my absence. I hope I can repay your commitment but finding my own. So here I am returning from an incredibly busy period of my life. I return to Google App Engine having moved on significantly and having gained a good deal of experience with Amazon Web Services. I feel a compare and contrast post coming on. That’s right, I did move over to AWS for a while, but fear not I have flip flopped back to the mighty GAE and will be very happy to tell you why.
This may not be appropriate for some services that are hosted at Google App Engine, but if you find yourself doing a lot of external web calls, then there is an opportunity to cut your cpu cycles. One of my main services is a news aggregation app which deals with around 400 feeds. This is implemented in a backend, so getting this component correct pays big dividends in terms of quota usage.
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