CMS over Google App Engine, with SEO

A small company is probably not going to get anywhere near the traffic to justify using Google App Engine. A very popular blog could be run on standard hardware and if it ever got so incredibly busy that it exhausted all your resources, it isn't that hard to add extra web servers and do some load distribution.

App Engine would be a better solution if you wanted to create your own blogging platform from scratch and then serve thousands/millions of different blogs for different people from your app.

As far as I am aware, the support on App Engine is limited to Python and a preview of Java and when it comes to applications that can run on it, these tend to be limited to development frameworks rather than turnkey applications such as Joomla, Wordpress etc. The main reason for this is that you have to write your applications in a particular way to take advantage of the scalability of AE and to use the languages that they currently support. The other stumbling block is that most turnkey apps tend to require a relational database and App Engine's datastore is not relational and doesn't work like the usual databases that these apps are built for. For example, you can't do a count of the number of records in a 'query', something that apps built on mysql/postgres/mssql almost take for granted.

-1: GAE is absolutely useful for small organizations; see [Wolfire's testimonial](http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/03/google-app-engine-for-indie-developers/). You say "it isn't that hard to add extra web servers and do some load distribution," but nobody could spend that much, that quickly, all in time for that one spike in traffic. Scalability is a strength, not a weakness.

Nikhil Chelliah 2009-05-14 01:35:12

They can't spend that much but can afford to spend the time and money developing an application in app engine on a technology they clearly aren't that familiar with? By that rationale, all apps should be rewritten for app engine so they are spike immune. Unfortunately, app engine does not magically make your apps scale

Neil Trodden 2009-05-14 08:19:29

..whoops, I didn't mean to submit that part message!..continued:app engine does not make your app scale magically, you still *do* need to make design changes to take into account the scalable architecture.Finally, you are welcome to mod me down, but I'd be interested to see if others thought my 'answer' said it was not useful - it doesn't. My answer does address the question asked which was namely if there is a ready-to-go turnkey app for blogging and there isn't and they would *need* to create one themselves in a technology that (inferring from the question) they don't fully understand.

Neil Trodden 2009-05-14 08:23:24

A small company is however going to enjoy getting started for free and incurring reasonable charges if they ever get enough traffic. Yes, TCO includes more than the cost of hardware and network capacity, but small businesses running on sweat equity have more human capital than cash. So +1 to Nikhil.Disclosure: I don't work for/with Google and have never ever completed a GAE app.

pluckyglen 2010-09-11 03:37:07

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CMS over Google App Engine, with SEO

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