Just finished launching another software service, so have had little time to write up this weeks posts. This one has taken several months and it came out of beta and open to the general user community today. It’s Java on AWS. Perhaps another series of posts beckons; once I’ve finished the ones I promised last week of course.
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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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 once had a long discussion with one of my respected colleagues regarding java web frameworks and the high level of bloat that they commonly contain. Why ruin a good thing with less than useful extensions. I want something that is small but perfectly formed. For some time after I was beginning to suspect my age was to blame for my disinterest in these shiny new toys. Old dogs and new tricks. However, I’m please to say I think I’ve found just what I’ve been looking for and as a result my senior moment can be put behind me. For the moment, at least.
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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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