Google App Engine for beginners - Tutorial (Java)

[Maciej Arkit]

Detailed article and video which will help to save your time during your first steps with GAE (Java):

Blog:

http://startup-with-gae.blogspot.com/2014/11/how-to-start-developing-google-app.html

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRVJdOPiVoo

regards,
Maciej

[Emanuele Ziglioli]

Thank you.
I think though that  every tutorial should start with the question:
1. is GAE for you? (if you're gonna deal with large data, likely not, cause costs of getting data in and out will kill you)
2. do you accept vendor lock-in? Be aware that moving your App off GAE will require your time in rewriting large portions of your code (unless you use AppScale, but who uses AppScale?)

So I tend to think it suits these cases:
1. Throw-away quick prototype code
2. Enterprise app with very low traffic, very few users, with a certain budget per month
3. Consumer apps with zero or near zero server interaction

[Maciej Arkit]

Hi Emanuele,
I agree with you.
Materials I've posted are part of workshop tutorial (and lectures) which also touches billing and pricing areas (I will publish whole materials soon).
Probably I've named this post incorrectly (misleading 'tutorial' world).
Anyway, I've been always struggling with exact estimate about cost of app hosted on GAE since there are many factors you have to calculate (thankfully GAE published recently calculator).
Thanks for your suggestions.

regards,
Maciej.

[Alex Martelli]

Ciao Emanuele,

I'm biased, of course -- but I've found App Engine a life saver for many web apps that just don't fit the constraints you're so adamant about.  Many of them internal (but we DO get charged internally, albeit in "funny money", so if it was much cheaper to deploy web apps otherwise we _would_ be quite aware of it), but a lot of them external, too (usually open-source apps co-developed with my wife and co-author Anna -- the only woman yet to win the Frank Willison Memorial Award for Contributions to the Python community, and very active in all sorts of communities).

On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 5:45 PM, Emanuele Ziglioli <the...@emanueleziglioli.it> wrote:

Thank you.
I think though that  every tutorial should start with the question:
1. is GAE for you? (if you're gonna deal with large data, likely not, cause costs of getting data in and out will kill you)

Depends on your definition of "large data".  If at Google scale, unless you can fruitfully use Google Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and the like, maybe not -- but if you're not worrying about "many petabytes" (in which case GCS and BQ can usually be deployed to support your GAE front-end) it's actually pretty fine.  For example, Snapchat -- see https://gigaom.com/2013/05/07/snapchats-act-of-faith-in-building-on-google-compute-engine/ -- is App Engine to the core, and almost two years after they've started their data volume has grown exponentially to what almost everybody in the world would consider "large data" (fortunately I didn't look at the exact numbers so I have no confidential info I'd risk revealing, but I don't think they're at "many petabytes" yet, whence the "almost everybody").

 

2. do you accept vendor lock-in? Be aware that moving your App off GAE will require your time in rewriting large portions of your code (unless you use AppScale, but who uses AppScale?)

Their front page highlights the WWF (hardly fitting your categories either, I think).  If you actually care about the issue I'd recommend contacting their marketing at http://www.appscale.com/contact/ -- they might well be able to share other customer references once you've signed an NDA.

So I tend to think it suits these cases:
1. Throw-away quick prototype code
2. Enterprise app with very low traffic, very few users, with a certain budget per month
3. Consumer apps with zero or near zero server interaction

Which of these categories would, for example, Snapchat fit in...? Or, say -- Best Buy, Coca Cola, Evite, Khan Academy, Pulse, O'Reilly's "Safari Books Online", Sony Music, Udacity...?! (If you need many more customer references, then contact our marketing -- again, more info may be privately available to you with an NDA &c -- assuming you're serious about this!-).

Alex

On Monday, 23 February 2015 05:59:08 UTC+13, Maciej Arkit wrote:

Detailed article and video which will help to save your time during your first steps with GAE (Java):

Blog:

http://startup-with-gae.blogspot.com/2014/11/how-to-start-developing-google-app.html

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRVJdOPiVoo

regards,
Maciej

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[Emanuele Ziglioli]

Ciao Alex,

"funny money", you got me curious!

You mentioned a number of success stories, it's good to see them, definitely.
I know and user a number of those apps that are built on GAE, Udacity certainly, perhaps also Coursera and Kahn Academy.
Again, to me they seem to fit the model "mostly static, little interaction".
Although, one of the courses on Udacity, the Parallel Programming one, requires a lot of server interaction, I suspect it talks to AWS.

My application gathers a lot of sensor data, and I keep having to go over that data, at a cost, in order to create export files.
Lately, I saw a link to a similar project (http://www.nimbits.com/index.jsp). I still need to understand how they organize large time series.

We're not talking about large bills, we pay perhaps $70/month for database access. Although that's quite a lot considering less than 50 customers access the database at any given time. It fits into the model of "enterprise app".
With 50,000,000 customers probably things would be different, maybe not. If we had deployed 50M devices out there, I would certainly be a lot busier ;-)

[Emanuele Ziglioli]

Looking forward to your next tutorials!

Cheers,
Emanuele