Simon Willison’s Weblog

Why Google App Engine is broken and what Google must do to fix it. Aral Balkan describes a number of critical issues with App Engine. If you’re considering building something serious on it you need to read this article; I’ve run in to several of these problems myself just running toy projects on the platform. Here’s hoping they get addressed in the near future. 3rd October 2008, 10 pm

html-whitelist (via) DeWitt Clinton’s web service wrapper aroud the html5lib HTML sanitiser, hosted on AppEngine. 24th September 2008, 11:54 pm

We haven’t changed the name of the conference to “Over Quota”. Aral is having intermittent App Engine quota problems, which are proving impossible to debug. I had a similar problem with an App Engine app a while ago—the quota / debugging story really needs fixing. 3rd September 2008, 1:37 pm

json-tinyurl. Because sometimes you want to be able to create a shorter version of a URL directly from JavaScript without hosting your own server-side proxy. 27th August 2008, 10:58 am

IMG-2-JSON (via) I’m not the only person deploying simple JSON-P APIs on App Engine: Adam Burmister’s tool extracts dimension, mimetype and EXIF metadata when provided the URL to an image file. 12th August 2008, 9:43 am

json-head. I’ve deployed another App Engine mini-app, which provides a JSON-P API for running HEAD requests against an arbitrary URL (useful for checking things like Content-Length and Content-Type headers and whether a URL returns 200). App Engine’s urlfetch limitations mean it can only deal with port 80 and 443 requests. 29th July 2008, 3:41 pm

How-to: Full-text search in Google App Engine. Use search.SearchableModel instead of db.Model—it’s pretty rough at the moment which is probably why it’s still undocumented. 27th June 2008, 8:25 am

jsontime. Nat and I threw this together this morning—it runs on Google App Engine and exposes Python’s pytz timezone library over JSONP. 21st June 2008, 7:07 pm

App Engine Fan: Efficient Global Counters. Implementing efficient counters in Google App Engine, using shards and/or memcached. 3rd June 2008, 12:56 am

I’ve (probably) been using Google App Engine for a week longer than you have. My snappily titled App Engine introduction, presented at BarCamp London 4. 1st June 2008, 3:02 am