Since there are 1500+ questions for google-app-engine, I was wondering:
(answers from actual GAE users are preferable, but logical assumptions from others are welcome)
Update: I was asking (as tagged) about the Java aspect of GAE.
Looks like people are using for lots of different applications. I've used it in the past because it offers Java hosting (and there doesn't appear to be a great deal of that around), and it's free for small applications.
The fact that is is "cloud"-based makes no difference whatsoever, but then the application that I deployed could have easily been hosted on a low-spec web container.
I'm working with a professional company developing a Facebook application using GAE for the backend. It's a convenient, affordable hosting backend and exceptionally scalable.
We're using the Python option so no Java.
Our choices were AWS, Azure, and GAE. We went with GAE after weighing pros/cons. A cloud-hosted environment takes a lot of the burden of support and maintenance off our team so we can focus on development/growth.
I'm currently working with App Engine because I believe this is the future of web apps. I am using for the backend of a sms application. It is very easy to work in, new features are added very frequently and it is "free" for small projects.
I would suggest using it when you need to "glue" two items together (ie. temperature sensors and sms).
I'm using it for a website I'm building. I'll be depending on this project for my day to day income so its pretty serious for me.
The reason I chose Google App Engine is because I hope to get big enough to where I would need more than shared hosting. And once you start paying for dedicated hosting it becomes a significant cost. But with Google App Engine I would not have to pay at all unless I grew to a point where I was serving millions of pages a month, and at that point I could make enough money from that.
Developing with the Google App Engine has been really slow compared to if I didn't have to learn and deal with all of its quirks. There have been problems with getting prominent java libraries (Spring, openid4java) working and other things.
However, when I read posts like http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/02/thermal-event-at-datacenter/ and http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/01/six-whys-or-never-trust-your-network-switch/ I feel glad I won't have to deal with that sort of stuff once I launch.
It's free to start, free to grow and cost nothing to scale. It cost nothing to support infrastructure. I think it's huge advantage.
I'm not sure what people use it for, but I'm going to migrate my "startup" (I hate word "startup" btw)
It's currently the only place you can host a robot for Wave and there are some serious players in that arena.
Personally, it's been a great way to experiment with XMPP and interface designs without having to worry about configuring an environment. Another big benefit is the ability to access multiple deployed versions of an application simultaneously.
Hi all this is a good article to compare google apps and microsoft window azure pricing..
Visit : http://expertdevelopersblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Google%20App%20Engine
Me, I'm only using it to "because the cloud is cool" (in other words, using it on toy-sized projects to educate myself). That doesn't disprove the existence of people running serious apps on it, but I think the majority of users are probably doing like me. By way of comparison, I know some people running serious full-sized companies on Amazon's cloud-computing infrastructure. Nothing against GAE here, I'm just reporting what I have seen.
Well, I basically chose GAE to develop 2 small apps because of the free hosting and the little configuration required. However, I used Python.
I used GAE because of the low start up cost for one. I'm a student programmer so I have a pretty low budget. I use GAE for my Flash game site startup, Bearded Games. I would classify it along the lines of a web app.It's a much better choice than PHP + MySQL and the python support makes it a great platform to work with. Check it out, it's a great platform for web apps.
For a small company like mine, having so many problems on the operations side of things solved for me is a huge attraction. This allows me to not waste any time on maintenance/operations types of things and allows me to concentrate on creating my own unique piece of functionality.
Hassle-free, automatic scaling is a big plus.
The fact that it offers free/low-cost (pay-as-you-go) Java hosting is an added bonus.
Allows me to try out ideas I have: if they work, GAE allows hassle-free scaling, if they don't, I have wasted considerably less time than if I'd done everything from scratch.
I, personally am getting stared with GAE, for the following reasons.
Despite all the pros, there is one huge con which is crucial to our costumer and which knocks out GAE and this is: privacy! Our customers would never ever consider saving their data within a database which is a potential security thread.
Furthermore, German law prohibits uncontrolled exposure of customer data. Since Google's data store is in the cloud, there may be data stored in the U.S., where, with respect to the "Patriot Act", all data may be scanned by governmental institutions. This is, of course, again a knock-out criteria when it comes to any sort of cloud-based solution, be it Azure, Amazon or whatever.
To satisfy the requirement of our customers, we have no choice but to run all hardware in-house.
However, if I had to choose an environment for a personal startup project with no privacy concerns at all, I seriously considered GAE ... and would then be in fear that, as soon as privacy becomes a concern, I would have to re-implement the whole project in SCALA ;-)
Finally: although I consider myself to be a Java coder, I would not recommend Java for small and middle size projects for all the reasons mentioned above. There is only one domain that I would still recommend Java, and this is the enterprise application domain.