[csytan]

It sounds like a lot of his problems stem from the use of Django. I've tried it before, and believe me, Django absolutely sucks on Appengine.

First off, you have a full featured framework which was designed for SQL relational databases. Many of Django's features either have to be given up, or are monkey-patched beyond belief to get partial functionality. Not to mention quite a few Django apps use database features which are simply not supported by BigTable.

Secondly, Django is not exactly the smallest framework, so loading time can be quite expensive and will be tacked on to every cold start.

All that being said, I've had good success with the tornado framework. It's fast, well written, and thoughtfully designed. Check out my profile if you want to see some examples of apps written with tornado + GAE.

[chipsy]

It's very telling that the author says they ported the whole site to a LAMP-type stack in a week - it could only be possible to do that if the architecture were built around that.

[Swizec]

I've been using Django on GAE for a while now and it's working pretty well.

There's a port called django-nonrel, which is specifically designed to work on nonrelational databases. So yes, you can't do fancy joins and stuff, but hey, most of the time you can work around that; but it's still great to be using the ORM just as you are used to it in 90% of the cases.

Although I do agree with the OP that all the rules GAE imposes can be a pain in the arse a lot of the time I really really love them. It pushes me to design my application well and to make it able to handle the load I'm expecting to be handling in a foreseeable future. If I didn't scaling even up to a few thousand users could get dicey.