I’ve been playing around with GAE for a few days and come to a few early conclusions.
- It’s very cool, very smart. The quality of the docs and examples is pretty good.
- It’s all about locking you in to Google’s user and data APIs. In exchange, you get their (presumably) massively scalable platform. Your users really need Google accounts.
- It’s fabulous for the Python lovers out there, and should help the language grow tremendously (which I think it deserves).
- This is just the start of the new wave of hosted scalable platforms, and I’m sure there will be much more coming from Google, Amazon, and others.
- I’d rather pay commodity prices and have complete control over data and advertising. Getting things free always worries me ;-)
I like the look of their datastore API, but I would prefer it if there were an open standard for entity persistence, instead of Amazon’s, or Google’s. I think the world is finally read for a post-RDBMS approach to massively scalable persistence of application data, but I’m not happy coding to a proprietary solution (yet).
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Following up, my experience using it was terrific, and I think it has the potential to be really successful — if people embrace Python and/or Google rolls out support for other languages soon.