Jun 22, 2011 - First Google App Engine experiences

One surprise of the Google I/O has been the announcement, that Go is now available as third language for the GoogleAppEngine. Ok, it's still experimental and not complete, but it's a start. There's a good intro and documentation available and the SDK contains some examples. The provided packages contain a good and simple API.

For my portal project a different technology stack has been planned: a Go HTTP server behind an Apache as proxy, the TidelandRestfulWebFramework and TidelandEventDrivenCellArchitecture for the business logic and Redis via the TidelandRedisDatabaseClient for persistency, all running on a Linux box. But let it run inside the Google App Engine is appealing: convenient and powerful services, a start at no charge and the possibility to scale. So I decided to evaluate it.

The first steps have been simple. The SDK is easy to install and it provides a local server with hot deployment and a tool to deploy the application on the Google servers. Also the configuration of my first application has been simple. The next step has been a first trivial program, really simple. Also the TidelandCommonGoLibrary integrates seemlessly and the TidelandRestfulWebFramework - currently under initial development - only needed few adoptions. Sadly the TidelandEventDrivenCellArchitecture doesn't work, right now goroutines outside requests are not fully supported.

But I found a good solution for my needs based on the task queues. They allow an asynchronous processing. Also the first steps using the data storrage and the memcache look very good. Their package integrate wonderful in Go. With the new release 1.5.1 also the capabilities and channel services reached the language integration. It's just a question of time when Go will have full support. Especially the usage of goroutines outside of requests will be interesting.

So right now I'm continuing developing my portal based on Google technology. Additionally the TidelandRestfulWebFramework grows depending on my needs. Maybe there'll be an additional package to ease the integration of the GoogleAppEngine into the TidelandRestfulWebFramework. But right now there's no urgent needance.