My previous post on Google App Engine looked more at the hosting model of the product. I touched lightly on some technical considerations and tried to avoid getting too detailed. Unfortunately, I didn’t get my invite to be one of the first 10 000 testers and therefore couldn’t really do an in-depth review beyond the superficial stuff that anyone can read about already anyway.
Niall Kennedy however, got right into it and gives us the details. His review is succinct and to the point. Just the meat and potatoes that us developers are looking for. I was actually rather surprised about some of the quota and resource limitations he reviewed in the later parts of the article.
Google App Engine is still in early stages — but is this it? It does seem to lack some rather important features common to more traditional web hosting providers; key libraries such as PIL are not available as SSL are not either. We’ll have to wait and see how it pans out to answer such questions regarding viability. So far, the verdict seems to be that most developers won’t trust it to run production-scale applications and would prefer to use it for prototyping or small throw-away applications.