Will Google App Engine Revolutionize Java Development?

Posted by The Bull
April 9, 2009

There is a lot of buzz in the Java community concerning the announcement over the availability of Java on the Google App Engine. It is a big boon for Java developers for sure, but there are some drawbacks for serious applications.

Logging

Seems you are stuck with using the JDK logging. Let’s face it, no developer in his right mind chooses that over Log4j. There just isn’t enough functionality there to make it worthwhile (reporting anyone?).

Persistence

You are limited to JDO. This can be both good and bad. JDO and related technologies, are fine for many applications, but there are times when you just need more power than object queries allow. The upside is that you probably don’t have to worry about data scaling needs.

Threading

You can’t create your own threads, nor presumably can anything else. This may be a big hindrance for many applications. For example I use the Quartz library all the time for various scheduling needs (especially in Grails).

There are a few other things you can and can’t do, but the ones above require some serious consideration before choosing to deploy on the app engine. On some brighter news, it looks like the Grails group is working on making Grails compatible with GAE. That alone will probably be the biggest use on GAE, and that isn’t a bad thing at all.

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