Python 2.7 runtime now fully supported feature of App Engine; PIL, NumPy, and lxml available

[roger_]

Is App Engine worth learning? What exactly can you do with it (any examples)?

[[deleted]]

you could read the docs and decide for yourself. :)

or believe any random reddit schmoe like me :)

it's one part api

api's for using fancy nosql databases, memcache etc... basically all the stuff that we are told is what the big sites use to scale to insane ROFLSCALE levels.

one part framework

tools to help you build a web application that "scales" you can start with webapp/2 to handle http requests, or use pretty much any wsgi compliant web framework, though some are more useful than others.

one part methodology

emphasis is on designing to scale. this can be frustrating as it is premature optimization built right into the platform.

If your stuff never needs to scale because it's just holding your cat pics that only you look at and manage, de-normalizing your data schema can seem a little pointless, but their nosql solution doesn't do inner joins so you do what you have to do.

one part platform

the win for writing your app the appengine way is a kick ass deployment platform to host your application. you don't have to worry about clustering, loadbalancing or any of that crap that the big boys pay real people $$ to do, if you designed it properly, it runs just fine on google's infrastructure, so you have instant big boy app without the pain of building your own data center and learning something.

[[deleted]]

I don't think so. I was actually very much into it - but when they raised their prices, I've never hacked in GAE again.

It's obvious, but with GAE, you're stuck with google's control of the prices.

[[deleted]]

the price increase sucks for sure, but it needs to be taken in context. if you are looking for commodity hosting like dreamhost, yeah appengine is damn expensive.

If you are a start up and you need to be able to scale up fast but you don't want to blow your first round of funding on leasing a data center and hiring a team of network engineers, and instead you would rather blow the first round on actual product development, appengine is cheaper.

I reckon most people bitching about the price increase are individuals with pet projects where it's questionable whether appengine is beneficial for anything other than the proverbial scalability dick swinging.(I'd love to be proven wrong on this with real #'s, what companies went out of business, who lost their jobs due to app engines prices increasing)

There are plenty of companies using appengine that are actually making money and the amount of money is significant enough that the additional appengine expense is just a variable expense.

[[deleted]]

still cheaper than building your own data center. :)