The AppEngine platform needs more tools

While Google’s App Engine is a platform just as things like Windows, *nix, or Sony’s PlayStations are, it is a new one that is sorely missing numerous tools that are readily available on other platforms. For example your OS has at least has command prompt and most likely a graphical file explorer that will [...]

Space-Based Architecture for AppEngine

Several posts ago I mentioned that I was waiting to see which cloud provider would be up to hosting Project Fangorn first.  In my last two posts (one, two) I talked about some of the issues with testing web apps on the GAE platform, but I didn’t mention what it was I was actually testing.
At [...]

Grey box testing web applications deployed to Google App Engine

Last post I stated:
Due GAE’s limitations on CPU time/cycles and an overall maximum limit of 10 seconds to fulfill a request a non-trivial set of unit tests will exceed the quotas if they are all run at the same time, so its necessary to run them in separate requests.
But in the two tests I’ve [...]

Unit testing web applications deployed to Google AppEngine

While the GAE SDK does provide the ability to run your web application locally, I’ve found that that the SDK’s local datastore doesn’t work precisely the same as the real one. Specially I’ve found that the local one is more permissive then the real one so its possible to get your app working locally [...]

Both App Engine and EC2 edge closer to the goal

In the two days since I posted that I was waiting to see if App Engine or an alternative got to the goal first both App Engine and EC2 have edged forward.
Yesterday Amazon announced a private beta for their own monitoring, load balancing, and automatic scaling service offering. Such included services is one of [...]

Waiting to see if App Engine or an alternative gets there first

After tracking down numerous alternatives to Google App Engine after hitting a wall on Project Fangorn, I looked at the most promising alternatives in more depth. Here is what I found.
GigaSpaces

Using GigaSpaces XAP would mean–at a minimum–creating Python bindings to their C++ API and re-writing my data model. Actually running on their EC2 [...]

Alternatives to Google App Engine

As I hit a wall in my development of Project Fangorn on Google’s App Engine platform I started looking around for alternative platforms. While there are numerous providers that claim to provide a cloud very few of them actually have a distributed datastore and a hosting environment that automatically expands and contracts (i.e. scale) [...]

Google App Engine not up to the task

Update 10/24/2008: It appears that the mcycle consumption of datastore operations are not actually counted against the soft cap and that GAE’s admin console is incorrectly including the consumption of datastore operations when issuing warnings about excessive mcycle consumption.
Update 12/16/2008: It starting to look like the mcycle consumption values I observed in GAE’s logs [...]

Project Fangorn playable prototypical preview deployed

I just played through all my initial turns for the playable prototypical preview of turn based web strategy game codenamed Project Fangorn that I deployed to Google App Engine earlier today.  At this point you are confined to your majorverse (home base) and you can’t come into contact with other players; however, you can build [...]

Project Fangorn progress V

At this point, I’ve got all of the game features implemented that I wanted in place before publishing a prototypical preview of Project Fangorn onto Google App Engine.  Fours things remain before publishing the preview:

Implement robust cross-entity cross-request update mechanism for changes to entities that are not all in the same entity group.
Improve error handling
Update [...]