GAE looks like this at first glance. But it turns out to be focused 90% on scalability, and 10% on easy deployment. The main issue for Django developers is that on GAE, you're using a nonrelational database. Assumptions about the RDBMS run deep in Django and in most Django apps, and great effort (see django-nonrel) is required to present even the thinnest veneer of compatibility.
In my experience (>2 years of GAE consulting for paying clients) I think using GAE is probably the wrong choice for most new projects. If you're new, you need to be able to iterate ideas quickly and you will value tools that (1) give you flexibility, (2) offer a lot of useful reusable libraries, and (3) have a large and stable culture (good docs, stable APIs, people you can hire). And if you have a scalability challenge somewhere down the road, it would make perfect sense to rewrite most of your app on a platform like GAE -- after all, by that point you'll have the basics of design quite solid, so you don't need as much flexibility, and every other part of the effort gets easier when you have money to throw at it.
It is a common misconception, though, that AppEngine serves the same needs as Heroku, or is a Heroku equivalent for Django. I think that's the main reason we didn't see more Herokus-for-Django* earlier.
They give you free-ness up to a rather large number of pageviews/users/whatever, right? Could the process be smoothed to make the workflow as smooth as Heroku makes it, or do the differences in Google's infrastructure make that too much of a pain to automate?
Pretend Heroku let you use any Rails app with a simple "git push origin master", as long as your app didn't use ActiveRecord. That proviso breaks every Rails book and tutorial, most gems/plugins, and many developers. (Heroku does have a bit of a learning curve: I had to hack the internals of four gems to get a client project working right. Still, easier than mixing AR.)
Nag, its not that easy to move from normal django to gae. A better way to do heroku-for-django would be do do heroku for django, instead of a complicated gae translation. Using gae you are limited and reliant on Google
GAE looks like this at first glance. But it turns out to be focused 90% on scalability, and 10% on easy deployment. The main issue for Django developers is that on GAE, you're using a nonrelational database. Assumptions about the RDBMS run deep in Django and in most Django apps, and great effort (see django-nonrel) is required to present even the thinnest veneer of compatibility.
In my experience (>2 years of GAE consulting for paying clients) I think using GAE is probably the wrong choice for most new projects. If you're new, you need to be able to iterate ideas quickly and you will value tools that (1) give you flexibility, (2) offer a lot of useful reusable libraries, and (3) have a large and stable culture (good docs, stable APIs, people you can hire). And if you have a scalability challenge somewhere down the road, it would make perfect sense to rewrite most of your app on a platform like GAE -- after all, by that point you'll have the basics of design quite solid, so you don't need as much flexibility, and every other part of the effort gets easier when you have money to throw at it.
It is a common misconception, though, that AppEngine serves the same needs as Heroku, or is a Heroku equivalent for Django. I think that's the main reason we didn't see more Herokus-for-Django* earlier.
*Disclaimer: I am a founder of http://djangozoom.com/ .
http://djangy.com is one
Google App Engine is similar, but not identical to normal Django.
They give you free-ness up to a rather large number of pageviews/users/whatever, right? Could the process be smoothed to make the workflow as smooth as Heroku makes it, or do the differences in Google's infrastructure make that too much of a pain to automate?
Pretend Heroku let you use any Rails app with a simple "git push origin master", as long as your app didn't use ActiveRecord. That proviso breaks every Rails book and tutorial, most gems/plugins, and many developers. (Heroku does have a bit of a learning curve: I had to hack the internals of four gems to get a client project working right. Still, easier than mixing AR.)
Nag, its not that easy to move from normal django to gae. A better way to do heroku-for-django would be do do heroku for django, instead of a complicated gae translation. Using gae you are limited and reliant on Google