Google App Engine on Java
Two big news items today:
- Oracle now own Sun.
- Google App Engine now supports Java.
Oracle on Sun
What I think is being overlooked here is that Oracle have now *inadvertently* bought MySQL (now owned by Sun), i.e. their only serious rival. This sounds like an anti-trust case to me.
Google App Engine on Java
I came *this* close to binning my GoDaddy account and switching to the App engine for my next big idea (a work in progress). However I’ve been warned by a current user to be wary of the Google-style process timer limits, and sure enough, looking through the documentation…
Source:
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/whatisgoogleappengine.html
“Application code only runs in response to a web request or a cron job, and must return response data within 30 seconds in any case. A request handler cannot spawn a sub-process or execute code after the response has been sent.”
Forcing developers to make their systems responsive is just good programming from Google, however I need to run a low intensity spider in the background once every hour. Currently this takes about two minutes to complete, but I expect it to run much longer on production data. Hence I can’t afford to have Google killing my code every 30 seconds. 
“An application cannot write to the file system. An app can read files, but only files uploaded with the application code. The app must use the App Engine datastore, memcache or other services for all data that persists between requests.“
Log4J files anyone?
I’ll have to keep an eye on this to see if anything changes, as “Free lunch” Google hosting sounds too good to resist.
23.4.2009 EDIT
Log4J support is here.
24.4.2009 EDIT
I stand corrected. It seems that the feature “Task queues for performing background processing” is high in the App Engine product roadmap for a June 2009 release. Maybe I’ll get my free lunch after all?
http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html
Thanks to all on this thread.
