It isn't really ready for prime-time. AppEngine still has some limits that make it hard to develop.
Examples:
The 1MB file upload limit. It's not that I want to have users uploading 500MB tars or something, but I don't want to put a message in my app saying, "please resize you photo to be less than 1MB before uploading where we'll probably alter the photo again."
They've indicated that you'll be able to purchase more storage and bandwidth which is great, but noticeably absent was the ability to send more than the 2,000 email limit (http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2008/12/system-status-da...). The problem might not be that I want to send more than 2,000 emails in a single day. The problem is that these quotas are rolling windows. Plus, the whole point is that AppEngine scales without me having to do anything. If it doesn't accommodate a decent sized social app, I might as well just put something on Slicehost or EC2 since at that low a usage rate, scaling isn't that hard.
There's no map/reduce or cron-like jobs. The datastore in AppEngine acts as a bit of a straight-jacket to ensure you don't do operations that don't scale. However, without map/reduce and cron jobs, it can mean that you just can't do certain things. And yes, I know that you could fake it by running another server, making an HTTP request to AppEngine and cutting up a process that might take a minute into chunks that AppEngine would execute, but that's just silly. The whole point of AppEngine is not having to deal with your own server and having an integrated environment that just works.
If the purpose of AppEngine is for developers not to worry about deployment and scaling, then it just fails because of some of the limitations. AppEngine doesn't scale. Maybe that's just a matter of the quotas being removed/being able to pay for more, but as of right now it doesn't scale at all. And it doesn't seem to be an amazingly high priority at Google. Software development takes time, but it's been a while since they said developers would be able to buy more and it hasn't come - beyond the recent blog posting I linked to showing some screen shots.
AppEngine could be a wonderful platform to develop on, but not until some of these problems get fixed.
Examples:
The 1MB file upload limit. It's not that I want to have users uploading 500MB tars or something, but I don't want to put a message in my app saying, "please resize you photo to be less than 1MB before uploading where we'll probably alter the photo again."
They've indicated that you'll be able to purchase more storage and bandwidth which is great, but noticeably absent was the ability to send more than the 2,000 email limit (http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2008/12/system-status-da...). The problem might not be that I want to send more than 2,000 emails in a single day. The problem is that these quotas are rolling windows. Plus, the whole point is that AppEngine scales without me having to do anything. If it doesn't accommodate a decent sized social app, I might as well just put something on Slicehost or EC2 since at that low a usage rate, scaling isn't that hard.
There's no map/reduce or cron-like jobs. The datastore in AppEngine acts as a bit of a straight-jacket to ensure you don't do operations that don't scale. However, without map/reduce and cron jobs, it can mean that you just can't do certain things. And yes, I know that you could fake it by running another server, making an HTTP request to AppEngine and cutting up a process that might take a minute into chunks that AppEngine would execute, but that's just silly. The whole point of AppEngine is not having to deal with your own server and having an integrated environment that just works.
If the purpose of AppEngine is for developers not to worry about deployment and scaling, then it just fails because of some of the limitations. AppEngine doesn't scale. Maybe that's just a matter of the quotas being removed/being able to pay for more, but as of right now it doesn't scale at all. And it doesn't seem to be an amazingly high priority at Google. Software development takes time, but it's been a while since they said developers would be able to buy more and it hasn't come - beyond the recent blog posting I linked to showing some screen shots.
AppEngine could be a wonderful platform to develop on, but not until some of these problems get fixed.