Can someone with recent GAE experience comment on how well it works these days? Any glaring problems, particularly with the JVM implementation? I plan to launch a Clojure web app in the next few months, and I'd love to avoid maintaining servers.
I'm on the Python end, and it's gotten a lot more stable and faster since it launched. A lot more features, too. A lot of the workarounds that we did early on to fix headaches and failure cases just aren't needed any more, so it's much closer to the abstraction we signed up for.
That said, if your site is always going to be small, you'll be able to do a lot of database queries much faster with MySQL, Redis, or what have you than with App Engine. The scalability wouldn't matter, so if you don't want to worry about database limitations, then it's a point against.
> That said, if your site is always going to be small, you'll be able to do a lot of database queries much faster with MySQL, Redis, or what have you than with App Engine.
If your site is small enough, you may be able to host for free on AppEngine. Even if it's not that small, AppEngine doesn't charge for availability, just for usage. In other words, you don't pay for idle time.
That is a plus. You can go very far within the free quota limits.
Another thing I forgot to mention is that if you want to use an external domain (clojuresombrero.com instead of closuresombrero.appspot.com), and you want users in China to be able to access it, then you need to run everything through a reverse proxy or they'll hit the Great Firewall block.
It may not be the best choice for an infrequently used Web page or App because your "slice" sleeps if not used for a while and the JVM takes a while to start up.
This is true, but should be a minor concern--you can easily ping it every once in a while to keep it hot without using very many resources. You might even be able to use App Engine's built in cron jobs to do it from the instance itself (might need more often than once a minute though).
