If I develop my web application on GAE using Java, in future would I have easy migration opportunities, or will I stuck to GAE?
What can be other alternatives of Google App Engine + Java?
Not:
An GAE you are pretty much developing inside a Google managed Container - against restricted Java and other APIs. This is the PaaS - Platform As A Service approach to cloud computing. This would be similar to the Salesforce, Facebook etc approach.
However for most flexibility you should look at IaaS - Infrastructure As A Service Cloud platforms (like Amazon/Rackspace/etc..) where you have most flexibility.
We currently use both Rackspace and Amazon and have machines as our elastic containers on top of which we can deploy anything we want (custom Ubuntu image etc..)
With some care, you can write a Java app such that it will work both on and off App Engine. A better option, though, would be to use AppScale if you choose to leave App Engine. AppScale provides an App Engine compatible environment on your own hardware.
right now most viable competitor of GAE is Windows Azure. You can easily build a site/application in Azure without getting dependent on Azure framework. There is /very/ little from Azure APIs that you have to deal with(mostly for diagnostics). If you decide to use other Azure services, like table storage services, you'll want to get real good at abstracting yourself away from the table storage to make your code portable. Dealing with SQL Azure (at least from utilization perspective) is no different then using SQL Server and you would need to make a simple abstraction from actual rdbms implementation (most data access libraries do that anyway) to later utilize MySQL or Oracle, etc.
You will probably be stuck to GAE (or a very similar platform you could replicate on your own).
Alternatives: Amazon EC2? Windows Azure?
Using GAE requires you to design the app around their system so migration could require a rewrite. Certainly their NoSQL db at the least. Some people are saying Amazon EC2 is a better bet, but I haven't tried it yet. Also I prefer python-based stuff like Django, rather than Java stuff. Try the pyjamas client-side toolkit also.
Related
I'm hoping someone can shed some light on this for me, seeing as I am fairly new to using Google Cloud Storage. Is it possible to use GCS in a non app-engine application, more specifically an application running in Kubernetes in GKE.
Also, how would one spin up a local development version of the storage for testing? All the examples I can find is app-engine specific, i.e. spinning up the app engine local development server.
Maybe some more context, we want to use this for serving dynamic images, so need fairly low-latency R/W to the storage.
Yes, absolutely. While Google Cloud Storage can be used with Google App Engine, it is a standalone service that can be interacted with from anywhere.
If latency and throughput are particularly important to you, it would make a lot of sense for you to run your application which deals directly with Google Cloud Storage from inside the Google Cloud, where it will experience very low latency and can achieve very high throughput. Many GCE applications use GCS, as well as AppEngine apps and Container Engine apps.
When dealing with GCS directly from outside of AppEngine, you will want to use one of our two public APIs, called the XML and JSON APIs. You could also use one of many client libraries which invoke those APIs. In addition, for ad-hoc tasks or for experimenting, you can use our command-line client, gsutil, as well as our interactive UI in the Google Cloud Console.
I have the impression that the Google App Engine allows an interface for developers to make use of Google's servers for storing custom application data in a highly scalable and cost effective way. Whilst working through their tutorials, it seems like tools are focused on aiding the development of 'web applications'.
I'm looking to take advantage of the GAE in order to serve data for a platform independent desktop application that I'm writing in Java, so my end product will not rest within the confines of a browser. Is this functionality supported by the GAE?
Yea! you can do that.
So basically, you are going to build a native application and use API calls to send/receive data from a server(GAE). I see a good solution will be to
Build your API endpoints using the Endpoints lib https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/java/endpoints
Then, depending on your application you can make API calls directly or build a client library
I was asked to provide a quick and easy solution for storing data in Java, and since I had experience in working with Google App engine, I thought that I could just use their Google Cloud Datastore (https://developers.google.com/datastore/). But, the project that I'm working on now is a desktop application with a GUI. My question is, would I be able to use these services even though the application I'm developing isn't a web app, and uses Java's GUI components?
Yes you can. The Cloud Datastore gives you access to the normal App Engine Datastore but does not require you to be running a web app. You can then use all the normal Datastore tools that App Wngine provides to manage your data.
You'll want to follow these instructions for setting up your Cloud Datastore project to connect from your GUI app.
It depends. dev_appserver isn't a hardened environment, and simulating a deployed environment is a priority over performance. dev_appserver provides a simulated Datastore, not the real thing. That said, I've built several single-user, locally-served web apps using both the Java and Python dev_appservers, because it was a convenient way to get started and performed well enough for my purposes.
I don't see why not,
Not a java dude, but it says it exposes a HTTP interface, so this:
code.google.com/p/google-http-java-client/
should allow you to communicate with it I believe.
Also perhaps have a read of this question
Database for Google App Engine and desktop application
I am split between the benefits of developing Java (non-commercial) webapps and deploying to something like Aptana or Google cloud, or just going with a Slice Host account. Tomcat or Jetty and MySQL are really my only big requirements. Aptana and Google App Engine come with some cool Eclipse deployment options, but does scalability really matter without a large user base for the apps?
Also, both Aptana and Google App Engine seem to be in infant stages, so I'm wondering if there will be too many restrictions, even for small time development. Anyone have experience with these?
I can't speak to Aptana but Google App Engine is a radically different development experience from what you'll get with something like Slicehost. It scales differently (i.e. you've got the possibility of handling much larger loads) but it's also totally different than running your own web app server (e.g. Glassfish, Tomcat, JBoss, etc.) and coding using "standard" Java tools.
With Slicehost or any hosted solution it's easy to setup your own development environment locally which exactly mimics what you'll be running on the server. Same software, same VM, maybe even the same version of Linux. You could even move to a different host and still be able to setup that same environment.
With Google App Engine you'll find yourself building on an emulator (you don't really run BigTable locally) so there's not a one to one correspondence between your environment and that on the server. There's no alternative place to move to and still be running in the same environment either. Also, some perhaps many of the popular Java frameworks you might use for a web app development will either not work at all (e.g. ) or will not work out-of-the-box (see here for more details).
I'm not down on the App Engine, in fact, I think it's really cool. If the demand for your apps is relatively low and therefore you're not in need of the huge scaling requirements, but your traffic is not so low that you fit comfortably within the free allowance at Google then I would probably lean towards a hosted solution like Slicehost instead.
I use slicehost and I am happy with the result so far. Its easy to upgrade your slice (I had to do it once already) and its easy to rollback to a backup of the slice (I had to do that once too). I am hosting Tomcat and MySQL.
Bear in mind, Google App Engine does not give you a full JRE. You cannot spawn threads directly, for example. Also, I have found that the GAE datastore performance is too slow -- I run into timeout exceptions constantly. In sum, it is not a true application hosting solution. You have to heavily tailor your application to make it run on GAE.
I'd suggest using Amazon Web Services. You get the power of the cloud with no limitations to your app, unlike App Engine.
We develop Java Web-aps (Websphere, DB2) which display graphical and databased information. We would also like to offer the same application offline (distribution via CD/DVD) with online data-update. We have tried a number of alternatives in the past, but nothing has been really stable. What are the new best practices to take a Web ap plus data (in a small database) offline?
I don't know how well it works with the CD/DVD distribution front, but the first thing that comes to mind is Gears. On the .NET side of the fence there's Silverlight 2. Then there's the Mozilla Prism project, although I don't know how far advanced that is.
These are all designed for not just offline access, but mixed offline/online, talking to a server when it's available and working locally when necessary.
I'd suggest using Apache Derby as the database (also available as Sun's Java DB, and possibly still IBM Cloudscape (does that still have DB2 compatibility in place?)).
I'm sure there's plenty of Web servers/Servlet containers about. Apache Tomcat is the obvious one. An alternative approach would be to use an embedded native browser within a single Java process. That approach should be relatively hassle free for users and tech support, and you can just use WebStart to install and update.
If you're using EJBs and other nonsense, then there are similar freebies about. I understand Sun Glassfish is nice and fast starting.
You could create an image of your server as a VMware instance and distribute it with a copy of VMware player (licensing allowing of course). Personally I'd build it on top of a Linux distribution like CentOS5.
You can bundle a JRE along with JETTY server and use a different database e.g HSQLDB (that you can bundle inside the webapp itself).
If you are using an ORM tool to connect to database, you might not have to make many code changes for this.
A lot of Application server distribute their admin consoles like this.For e.g Weblogic admin console runs offline (it uses internal ldap server for its database)
Also as far as Google gears is concerned, they are also pretty much doing the same thing.
They have a server that is bundled along with SQLDB and they allow to synchronize the data between online offline app.
You can sync the data too (use webservices in the online app) and talk over https from the offline app to sync the data, if you need the sync feature.
Also you can check this link
http://developers.sun.com/learning/javaoneonline/2007/pdf/TS-69700.pdf