gistfile1.txt

Ryan's reply to http://www.espians.com/why-app-engine-is-not-appropriate-for-bootstrap.html


thanks for the post! we're always interested in well-reasoned feedback like this.



it probably won't surprise you that most of the answers here boil down to priorities. we'd love to implement most of these, but we're not a big team, so we have to prioritize ruthlessly. i can address a few points specifically, though.



2) agreed! unfortunately, datastore backend support for this is unlikely due to the underlying implementation on bigtable. happily, this is entirely possible in userland. my groups post has more details: http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_thread/thread/6e1e8f9321f53775#8469e1cffdfa828c . brett slatkin's recent i/o talk is also related, specifically the relation indexes/entities part: http://code.google.com/events/io/sessions/BuildingScalableComplexApps.html .



3) we actually considered this, and we may reconsider it in the future. the actual savings would be negligible in most cases, though. the only meaningful part we could remove is some of the protocol buffer encoding decoding and maybe one or two of the RPCs. the bulk of it, including the underlying datastore cost, would be unchanged.



5) i'm very much looking forward to offering more async support in our APIs. in the meantime, check out vendasta's asynctools project, http://squeeville.com/2009/07/24/asynctools/ .



6) we actually posted an in-depth postmortem less than a week afterward: http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_thread/thread/e9237fc7b0aa7df5#ba95ded980c8c179 . regardless, agreed, we hate outages as much as everyone else. we're continually working to avoid and minimize them.