Where Google App Engine rocked and where it dissappointed

When GAE was released I was jumping on my seat (to the extent that my fat ass nearly broke it), literally, not because I thought it was a great, fantastic, never thought before idea that gave developers the freedom to forget about scalability and get on with their stuff, but because it was something I always wanted to build.

Okay not exactly that but a similar system but which would run on the LAMP stack and give the developers a freedom to use any framework. Don't get the title of this post wrong, GAE is a great dev environment and all but there are some issues that I faced recently when I was writing my app called Cricroar.

It took me about 6 hours to build a first version (the current one online), that included a simple CSS, a simple database model, few simple javascripts, the core data entry/retrieval code (business logic if you may) and finally the interface.

Rocked

• The fact that you do not have to set up a server. ftp, give away accounts to people is just simply awesome. You can simply concentrate on development, uploading the code, configuring etc is just Allohomora.
• If you have basic working knowledge on python, building a simple datamodel classes (your database) and the code to enter/retrieve data wont be a problem. The database model syntax is very intuitive.
• Using static files images and CSS is very easy.
• GAE uses Django templates for rendering html, even if you are not exposed to Django, understanding templates is very easy and quick to implement. Moreover it imposes the practice of not filling in your logic in your interface, helps you keep things clean.

Disappointed

• Theres a lot of limitations with the Database model. You cannot "count" more than 1000 records. sad, i know.
• No Joins allowed, enough said.
• Theres no phpMyAdmin like app to view/edit the data in the admin panel.
• I think analytics could have been built in but for some reason the admin panel only gives you an idea of the cpu usage and queries.

I think GAE does provide a great head start if you want to develop your apps quickly and add features but it has serious implementations as far as database is concerned but definitely worth considering if you have not yet begun development on some other platform. I am definitely going to spend more time on cricroar, especially since I love cricket :)