Google App Engine is pretty neat, in a get-your-application-hosted-and-scaled-by-Google kinda way. I'd recommend downloading the SDK and going through the example - the simple scaling and access to the scalable database are probably the best things about it, it's just a shame that "Query filters do not have an explicit way to match just part of a string value" at the moment.
Update: well there is google.appengine.ext.search for now:
We've included a short-term full text search library in the google.appengine.ext.search module. It's limited, so we don't discuss it much in the documentation. We expect to provide a more robust, full featured solution eventually. Until then, here's the google.appengine.ext.search docstring: """Full text indexing and search, implemented in pure python. Defines a SearchableModel subclass of db.Model that supports full text indexing and search, based on the datastore's existing indexes. Don't expect too much. First, there's no ranking, which is a killer drawback. There's also no exact phrase match, substring match, boolean operators, stemming, or other common full text search features. Finally, support for stop words (common words that are not indexed) is currently limited to English.
it's just a shame that "Query filters do not have...
Well, that, and the fact its Python only...
While there are probably many apps running on EC2 that could jump to GAE, I'm guessing most of them are written in PHP or Ruby, maybe even Java. BigTable/GQL is certainly far better than SimpleDB's "Eventual Consistency...but Immediate Frustration" approach. Too bad its locked away from the majority of web developers.
But hopefully, it will at least put some price pressure on Amazon.
Re:Another shame...
kjones4 on 2008-04-08T15:26:30
They say that other languages are coming soon. It would be a nice option if Perl were one of the languages. I imagine Java and/or Javascript will be coming soon.
