AppJet: Another cloud application framework | Hacker News Reader

AppJet: Another cloud application framework

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27 pointsastine8 comments

I'm still not impressed. There are many things wrong with it:

1. I don't know anyone who actually likes javascript. Lots of people use it, but I've never met anyone who loves it. People love ruby, python, C++, VB6, Delphi, Lisp, Clojure, but there are some languages that people just use but don't love, and Javascript is one of them

2. Why ever would I put my eggs in their basket? Learn a new framework, and have all this run on their servers? They may pull this anytime, and what am I left with - a .jar file that I now have to purchase some expensive server to run with?

3. I don't see that they will scale. Google, I KNOW they scale because they are at the top of the heap, but I don't know who AppJet are.

Frameworks and languages are a big investment for a programmer, and AppJet offers a lot of uncertainty, but no clear benefit.

Sorry about this, but this one gets my thumb down (again).

I actually really enjoy JavaScript. I secretly enjoy closurefu and first-class functions.

Well, it seems that it isn't a secret anymore.

Kinda like Victoria's.

1. I don't think any current language is worth loving, but for what I write JS sucks less than any other. It seems like the lang is a kind of programmer Rorschach test: there isn't really "the JavaScript way", it's what you (and others) make it. The interesting thing about reading other people's JS code is that I can usually tell right away which other languages they know (and those they don't).

But that's just JavaScript; I prefer the AppJet framework to the other server-side solutions (namely Jaxer) and the web libs I've tried out for the langs you mention.

2. Once App Engine supports Java, one should be able to run "JavaScript on Jets" on Google's servers. Plus there's always AWS.

3. I've been using AppJet daily for almost two months, and I've only experienced a few seconds of downtime. Etherpad seemed to stay up. I trust them so far; two of the founders did work at Google.

Is this maybe targeted more at novice programmers? A web IDE doesn't make that much sense if you already have local source control, there's an "Absolute Beginner's Guide to Programming" (http://appjet.com/learn-to-program/lessons/intro) linked right on the front page, and the whole experience seems to encourage experimentation with instant feedback. If I'm right, all the comments about Google App Engine miss the point.

Looks interesting, but I don't know if their architecture can scale as much as appengine.

I think that's the big flaw with this, and that's simply that it's a small company. The one thing I can't risk in my cloud app framework is that the company will suddenly go under or that it won't truly scale.

Otherwise, it's cool.

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