I am confused. I thought these were both hosting solutions that Google sells or makes free. What is the difference between the two?
Thanks,
Alex
Google Code is a SourceForge-style hosting solution for open source projects: you can host your code in a supplied Subversion or Mercurial repository and document your project in a wiki. You cannot run code on Google Code, only upload your source code to share with others. It's free.
Google App Engine is a general cloud application host. You can host web sites written in Python or Java, actually running code on Google's servers, with cost proportional to usage (it's free up to some amount).
Related
I have used JasperReports in past Java projects in combination with iReport for building dynamic reports that run against a database, but I understand that Google App Engine does not support JasperReports. Can anyone point me to something similar, or a report generation mechanism that is compatible with GAE?
I'm not really sure if you made any progress on this ( if you did please let us know!)
As far as I know The GAE team has marked this issue as NO-FIX. My suggestion is to try:
1) PDF Jet + Jcharts , both are pure java and do not depend on any of the balcklisted classes. I've has some limited succes with this.
2) Using Managed VMs which are not limited as the standard sandbox.
3) Finnaly, using the Google Drive API to create your docs (using a service account) and then just provide the export URL for PDF.
To be honest I ended up doing #3, while being a little more complex in the long run i found some additional benefits of having my reports pre-built and hosted on Drive.
Hope it helps.
I have this application that will be run in a local network where a number of devices should interact with a database. I could use xampp and go for CherryPy or any other Python framework (Python is usually my choice) but it is the sum of a lot of different things: Python, Apache, MySQL... With GAE, which I have previously used in a number of applications successfully, I feel everything is neatly packed in a single box. Thay may not be true, but using the Google App Engine Launcher to create a local working copy of an app couldn't be easier.
But is it reliable? Should it be used like that? I know it's intended for development, so I'm unsure about using it as a local server in production. A few versions ago there even was this nasty bug that flushed the local datastore from time to time. But it seems that they fixed it and now data persists.
Would you recommend GAE for an application running in a local network or should I stick to LAMP (P for Python)?
Other alternative is http://code.google.com/p/appscale/.
May be you can check the the project TyphoonAE. I think it is exactly what you need.
The TyphoonAE project aims at providing a full-featured and productive
serving environment to run Google App Engine (Python) applications. It
delivers the parts for building your own scalable App Engine while
staying compatible with Google's API.
I have created a GWT application and now want to deploy it outside GAE. The reason I wish to deploy outside the GAE is the Sandbox security feature of GAE, which disallows me from writing files to my system. I store my data in the form of an ontology (.owl file) under my '/war/WEB_INF' and I want the end user to be able to modify (write to / save) this file through the server.
I understand that GAE does not let me do this, but is there a paid Google Service (e.g. google apps) that would allow hosting a GWT application which would allow writing files to the system? For instance, like an add-on to GAE?
If not, what solution would you recommend to host a GWT application (that would let me write a file to the WEB-INF folder) on the web?
EDIT: I solved this by deploying the GWT project as a .war file and hosting in TomCat.
I'm very new to GAE, but in case you haven't looked at their experimental write/read blobstore services you can check that out here. They have a similar API for python I believe. It's ofcourse stored on the GAE blobstore and not under /war/WEB-INF/ directory but It does allow a possible solution to what you're looking for.
Also, if you're looking to run your own server (possibly on EC2 for example), then you might want to look into AppScale. But I, personally, would stay away from that as a solution because I highly doubt that AppScale performs as well as google's GAE web servers and furthermore lacks the same degree of support/development.
Have you ruled out something like creating an Owl Entity to hold your ontologies, and arranging for *.owl requests to be handled by using that as a key name to find and serve the corresponding Owl? That's really simple code.
GWT is primarily a client side technology. GAE is a server side technology. You seem to be getting GWT and GAE engine mixed up with each other. GAE can work with almost any client side technology, and GWT can connect to many different back end platforms.
Are you trying to move your back end code directly to a new platform? Are you planning on rewriting the back end for a new platform, but keep the GWT code? What is your goal for this application? To be used by you and a few friends, or by thousands of people? For free or paying customers?
If you want to move off of AppEngine, you can switch to pretty much any java hosting service that you want - anything from a tiny shared VPS up to a Amazon EC2 mini cloud of your own. I don't think google offers generic java hosting. I don't know how you have built your application's back end, but you probably used servlets, which you should be able to get working pretty much anywhere.
If you want to stay on AppEngine, you should think about whether or not you can break your owl file into smaller sections that can be stored as entities in the database.
Whichever platform you choose, if you are planning on serving more than a few people, you will need some way to prevent one giant owl file from becoming a huge bottleneck.
Is it possible to access or download my code that is running on Google App Engine? For instance, say my hard drive crashes and I have not saved my code on any kind of external repository. Is there any way to recover?
No, it is not possible. You compile your code on your machine and ship up the compiled code.
If you have a source repository, always make sure that you have a backup.
GAE does not have a mechanism for you to download your binaries, so reverse engineering them is not possible except from your own copies.
Of course you could always host your project on GitHub or SourceForge
see also:
how to download google appengine (uploaded)application files
Can I restore my source code that has been uploaded into Google AppEngine?
How do I download the source code of a google app engine project?
Download source code of deployed GAE application
Get source of appengine published version
I can't find it now, but I remember reading a post where they were pretty specific about NOT being able to do that. The gist of it was that they were not a backup service and that you were responsible for backing up your own code.
There is a "datastore backup and restore" feature on the project roadmap though: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html I've skimmed over a few posts where people talk about ways to backup the database now without that the official sanctioned feature implemented... of course your datastore isn't your code.
Since ColdFusion is itself Java-based, I would imagine it's not too much of a stretch to suggest that CFML code could be deployed on Google App Engine.
BlueDragon is a commercial solution for deploying CFML code on Java servers.
It's described in this thread how someone got OpenBD (Blue Dragon) running on App Engine:
OpenBD on Google App Engine for Java
Are there any open source alternatives
that could be used for App Engine?
Railo is another obvious candidate here, and some people appear to be trying to tweak it for use on Google App Engine.
I am putting together some demos that run on Open BlueDragon, which in turn is running on Google App Engine. The list is small at the moment, but eventually it should give you a good idea of what is opssible with OpenBD and GAE.
http://www.brighthub.com/hubfolio/matthew-casperson/blog/archive/2010/05/12/cold-fusion-demos.aspx
Check out
http://www.stax.net/ - Stax networks made by a former Allaire(r)?
Works great, supports coldfusion out of the ..cloud. You download a precompiled source file, put your stuff in, upload it and it all works, no fighting with it.
I know google app engine is quite restrictive, it will involve opening up the source and removing everything that attempts to write to the file system, and changing your database interaction.
You can checkout this thread and group as a resource for Open BlueDragon as well as the wiki. Looks like they have a branch already which is working towards GAE compatibility.
On the Railo side of the CFML open source pond you can reference this article from help compiling Railo on your own from the source.
Joining both of their respective google groups and asking questions should yield fruitful as well.
Good Luck!