During MediaCamp2 we had a round table discussion about GAE.
Last April Google launched the Application engine. On launch it was limited to the first 10,000 developers who signed up to be part of a beta testing period. Since then the signups have been completely opened to anyone who wished to deploy applications on the Google cloud. This Feburay Billing was introduced taking App Engine officially out of Beta.
So what’s App Engine?
Google App Engine is a platform for building and hosting web applications on Google Web Servers.
Why?
Scalability, and peace of mind.
You no longer need to worry about the administration work, you just develop your web app.
Limitations
Limited to HTTP apps, no sockets, no local filesystem
1mb storage per object in data store
10mb per limit for http get / post requests
Big Table, is a proprietary non-relational distributed database.
– Cannot do the expensive GROUP BY, SUM, COUNT(*) aggregate calculations
– Cannot join tables (no relations!)
So this is where things get interesting and complicated.
– So we wonder how are these things done?
different mindset
For GAE we need to put aside everything we have learned about relations and databases, and start thinking about what data will be needed.
All our aggregate operations need to be re-thought out and will be prepared.
Slides
Links
read more on the Wiki page for this session
Related open source projects
Session by Vassilis Fourniadis
Media Camp Athens 