Google AppEngine Hack-a-thon

AppEngine swag

Google held a hack-a-thon at their New York office today, showing off their new AppEngine platform and giving developers a chance to take it for a test drive. My python programming experience is limited to some cramming with the O’Reilly book over the last few days, but it was still fairly easy to get a basic web application up and running. AppEngine looks to be an interesting new addition to the cloud computing marketplace.

Unfortunately, for my current needs, AppEngine has some critical limitations. There is no filesystem access, meaning I can’t use any python libraries which require the filesystem for processing. In addition, the only way to pull data into your application is through the URL Fetch API, which is limited to files one megabyte or smaller. This restriction dashed my plans to build an mp3 metadata indexing service on the platform, since a typical mp3 file is at least 5 megabytes today.

While preventing filesystem access may be a fundamental piece of the AppEngine security architecture, it seems likely that other limitations, such as that on URL Fetch, will be removed as the platform matures. I’m hopeful Google will move quickly to remove these barriers and make AppEngine a more suitable platform for a broad spectrum of web applications.