I recently completed work on an app built on AppEngine and Google Web Toolkit:
It's basically a logo design app with a twist - follow the link if you wanna find out more on the app itself.
To the point, the team on this project came mostly from a Java background and even though I am mainly a .NET nut I also have a bit of Java under the belt, so this project represented the perfect opportunity for me to get some sweet AppEngine + GWT action.
So here we go, here's the good old list of things I really liked about the setup on this project (Java/AppEngine/GWT on Eclipse + Google plugins) compared to the setup I am more familiar with (C#/ASP.NET + SQLServer + Azure hosting, all on VS):
- With AppEngine and the Google-Datastore you don't have to cope with SQL or SQLServer (and if you follow this blog you know how I feel about SQL)
- You can literally deploy your app with one-click from the eclipse plug-in (all extremely easy to setup - and it works)
- Hosting is free on google appspot (if you don't go over the free quotas, and quite cheap after that anyway)
- GWT = virtually no messing around with javascript (I do like javascript but not if I am in a hurry)
- .NET/VS to JAVA/Eclipse transition turned out to be OK (Eclipse is pretty cool) with people around to rely on
So far AppEngine has proven reliable - the app still runs a bit slow but we did not put any effort into improving performance (I've seen ASP.NET apps running much slower, and it rarely boils down to hosting anyway) - stay tuned for more.
