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#1 has been addressed; the GAE jars are officially published to the maven central repository. #2 is a puzzling statement to make. Compared to an RDBMS, GAE's datastore is a much more natural fit for Java object graphs because it supports hierarchical data and is naturally polymorphic. Hibernate makes crazy contortions to match up the models and this complexity bleeds through to the API. There is definitely a learning curve if you have a background in RDBMS development, but you can say the same about MongoDB or Riak or any other NoSQL store. Nevertheless, the benefits of an autoscaling, distributed, replicated, zero-administration datastore are compelling. #2a If you really really want MySQL, GAE now offers it (Cloud SQL). #3 is a bit ambiguous - yes, there are limitations, as there are in any hosted environment. There's a 60s deadline on startup requests, but it's not usually hard to keep even Spring apps under this limit. The missing Java classes are things like Swing - you won't miss them. Yes, things like the Servlet spec are a little old, but the servlet api hasn't changed in any material way in the last decade. It's not perfect, but App Engine is still an awesome platform for startups. It eliminates ops and devops roles so you spend all your time writing features. |
#2a they _just_ offer this (private/invite beta since last year). And no, I want PostgreSQL ;)
#3 In the past, JAXB doesn't work well, ditto with some of the reflection stuff.
List of unsupported stuff: http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/wiki/WillItPlayInJa...
No JMX, JMS, JAX-WS (server), iText (PDF generation). Various libraries seem to require little "tweaks" here and there, no, I want to get it from Maven and be done with it.
The problem is keeping up to date with the latest spec fast enough.
I'm not looking for perfect though, I'm looking for standard JavaEE stuff.