My first impressions of Google App Engine
Since I got my invitation and am tired of Haloscan not being reachable from home (not their fault, probably), I decided that my first project would be a comment hosting app.
In other words, something a bit HaloScan-like.
Since I have very limited resources, it will probably not be useful for many people, but I am learning about App Engine, and at the same time probably making my blog a wee bit more comfortable.
Some random thoughts:
Can I put Google ads in app engine apps?
Does anyone else need this kind of app? I intend to make it open, so anyone can register its blog in it and use it. 500MB (the max DB size) are a lot of comments. Like a million of them.
I intend to use Yahoo's YUI RTE for editing. So my app will be hosted in Yahoo and Google. Cool :-D
It's basically just Django. Sure, no UNIQUE, no CRUD (ok, there is Google's, which is kinda lame... hire one of the Django guys and mke him work on it ;-), but it's the same thing, give or take a few bytes, specially using djangoforms.
webapp is... ok, it's rather ugly. Routing the requests is annoying, you can't do things like passing parts of the URL as parameters...
The User/DataStore APIs are ok, they feel a bit limited but they have a lot of scope in other ways (as in, there are a few million registered users and many TB of data stored ;-)
All things considered, a nice thing to use, specially at the cost.
Why don't you use Disqus on your blog ? http://disqus.com/