thejavajar

Google App Engine’s support of Java was a long awaited, highly demanded feature of the service back when I first started messing around with original, Python version a little over a year ago. The excitement that App Engine brought to developers was echoed by the overwhelming request for Java support. Over the past 10 days I have created a few sample applications locally to give it a test. I went the App Engine Eclipse plugin route to get things started. It is a really nice plugin that delivers what you would expect from Google. Once installed, you can create a project and have it running in under a minute.

Once I got familiar with what I was working with, I decided to turn this sample application into a simple Spring Web Flow 2 demo. That is where development stopped. Unfortunately, there are a lot of JVM features/classes that are not accessible on App Engine that Web Flow 2 (and 3rd party libraries) needs for binding and flow execution support. Nothing against Google or SpringSource, I just did not get what I wanted.

Fortunately, I created a new sample app that is based on Groovy’s Groovlet technology and things were moving forward again. Just configure the GroovyServlet in your web.xml file and away you go. My next experiment will be to work with Grails on App Engine via the Grails App Engine plugin.

Overall, App Engine is great. It is really easy to use and the application dashboard features are amazing. Access to application and admin log files in a nice HTML based presentation. Quota detail that explains bandwidth, CPU and datastore utilization along with access to different versions of your application.  You can even grant access to other developers for collaboration efforts. All features you normally do not get from your company’s “Enterprise” admin group.

On a side note, Vladimir Vivien and I will be discussing Google App Engine at the Tampa JUG on August 25th, 2009.