Google Appengine now supports HTTPS | Hacker News Reader

Google Appengine now supports HTTPS

googleappengine.blogspot.com

24 pointsptm16 comments

Guido van Rossum will give a talk on Google App Engine on Nov 5 at Stanford. The talk can be viewed over the web.

http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/

Yikes. At this time either use the appspot.com domain for your URLs or, perhaps in the future, use a technique implemented by only the most modern of browsers (but excluding Safari at the moment). I'm sure that'll work for some people out there. Others, like me, are out of luck. :-(

I haven't been paying much attention to AppEngine, but it seems like kind of a major oversight that there was no SSL support until now. Is anyone using this thing for real work? I don't know how it could be considered much more than a neat toy to play with given its lack for such basic features for so long.

We use it for http://www.muspy.com, though we are thinking about moving away to plain Django. GAE has too many limitations.

> GAE has too many limitations

could you elaborate please?

We are looking to get into GAE from plain Django, so I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

The limitations are well known, just Google around. A relatively good overview can be found here: http://aralbalkan.com/1504

It was discussed in this thread: http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_threa...

It definitely depends on the kind of app you are doing. From my experience GAE is great for websites with high ratio of reads to writes. If you have a lot of writes or any non-trivial background processing, it becomes harder to develop for appengine.

thank you.

Ruby on Rails please.

They already launched Rails hosting with liquid scaling. It's called http://heroku.com

I don't think it has liquid database scaling the way App Engine does. If you have to even spend a second thinking about sharding, partitioning, replication lag, etc. then you're not getting the same functionality.

My experience with App Engine is that you have to think pretty hard about sharding and partitioning - the hierarchy part of the App Engine data store controls which bits of your data live in the same place, and hence what can be modified in a single transaction.

Umm... Why? I thought the whole point of Google AppEngine is that you get to run your application on the same infrastructure (hardware as well as development platform) Google uses for their own applications. If you want Ruby on Rails go download Ruby on Rails or find a web host that supports it.

Google doesn't run their development platform in Python, they just chose that language because Google App Engine was created by one of the Python gurus.

In order to hit critical mass, they have to accommodate the masses. Currently, the 2 most popular languages for web programming are PHP and Ruby, neither of which are supported. In my opinion, if they did support it, they would get more business.

I am not sure where you get your information from. It is my understanding that Python is one of a few languages used at Google and is used quite extensively. If I am not mistaken GMail and Youtube are Python applications. The fact that they do use Python may have something to do with having the creator of the language on the payroll.

I won't dispute the popularity of PHP, but I believe you are very much mistaken about the popularity of Ruby for web development. I would be surprised if it was even in the top 10. Our view is probably a little skewed since a lot of the people on HN and popular blogs are alpha geek types. There are lots and lots of people still using things like ASP and Java for development.

Do you have anything to back any of this up?

I see where you guys are coming from, after doing a little research on my own I came across this post:

http://www.caffeinatedcoder.com/programming-language-trends/

That states that Ruby is not even in the top 10 programming languages.

So you guys definitely have a strong argument against using the popularity of Ruby on Rails.

But I just feel that there is an undeniable buzz and almost evangelical devotion to the Rails framework from its users. That energy could have been harvested by Google App Engine if they adapted their software to work around Ruby. I'd contend that while C# and Java are still really big for enterprise websites, in my personal little closed world, it seems that those programmers that are in GAE's target user base (amateur hackers that want to pump out quick web applications) are more prone to be Ruby on Rails or PHP guys. But I do not have any hard evidence to back this up, and you guys are definitely entitled to your own opinions.

Currently, the 2 most popular languages for web programming are PHP and Ruby

Do you have any hard numbers supporting this? IMHO the most popular languages on the web are PHP, Perl, C#/VB.NET and Java; and Python is more popular than Ruby (at least according to the TIOBE index). But Ruby definitely has the most hype :)

While GAE has a lot of problems, Google did the right thing releasing it in the language they are most familiar with. Python is extremely easy to pick up and feature-wise it's comparable to other dynamic languages like Ruby. I'd rather Google spend time working on the features GAE is still missing (background tasks, SSL, datastore stability, etc), it just gives more value to the platform than supporting additional languages.

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