Anyone up to creating a tomcat based alternative for GAE?

Question

Hi,

If we had the possibility to run GAE app without any code change on our servlet engine that would be great because:

• in case that google changes their billing policy we can just jump to our own server or in case their current policy doesn't fit our app needs
• we can do stuff which is not allowed in the GAE, compromising a 1 JVM, 1 DB
• We don't actually need a distributed system but more of a realtime system with synchronize, true locking mechanisms, other servers/software installed on the server machine, socket interface etc...

Such a package should include at least:

• TomCat (or equivalent)
• DataNucleus Access Platform
• (Task Queue service)

Any idea if it's easy to get such a thing or if it's already exist somewhere?

Thanks

Answer 1

Good question - GAE is excellent, but it has considerable limitations, so I think it is a good idea to keep your options open. With that in mind here are some options.

http://appscale.cs.ucsb.edu/ "AppScale is a platform that allows users to deploy and host their own Google App Engine applications. It executes automatically over Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus as well as Xen and KVM. It has been developed and is maintained by the RACELab at UC Santa Barbara.

There is also TyphoonAE but it is Python specific so probably not useful for you.

Also take note of the Siena project... http://www.sienaproject.com/index.html This is supposed to provide GAE/J users with a persistence API that is better suited to the GAE Datastore then JDO/JPA, but is still portable to other platforms.