Yesterday
Peter Farrell pointed me to a
brochure site he did for a friend. Looks great, it's running
Mach-II 1.8 beta, using SES URLs, all great stuff.
Then he told me it was running on
Open BlueDragon for
Google App Engine (GAE). VERY cool. You can read a bit more about it on
Peter's blog. I could be wrong, but I think this may be the first production site running on OpenBD on GAE. (If there are others out there, I'd love some links!)
The interest in running CFML apps on GAE has really been picking up lately, and with good reason. It's a dead simple way to deploy CFML applications to Google's cloud, and unless the site is going to get a huge amount of traffic it's completely free.
Free CFML engine, free hosting, easy deployment right from Eclipse ... there's a lot to love here. No more hunting around for cheap shared hosting accounts that are so restrictive they're barely usable, no more spending money on a VPS if you don't need one (though I highly recommend them!), you just build your app and deploy right to GAE.
Since a lot of people I've been talking with recently aren't all that familiar with GAE, I'd like to point out that it's a bit of a different paradigm than many other cloud computing services. Unlike Amazon EC2, where you're dealing with things at the server level, GAE is application-oriented. So you don't have a server with an operating system on which you install a servlet container and OpenBD, instead you're simply deploying individual applications to Google's Java infrastructure. It's a really nice way to do things since the server-level stuff is all handled for you.
Be aware that there are some restrictions on what you can do on GAE vs. deploying on your own server, but really these are just differences rather than any huge impediments:
- Unless you use the Virtual File System (VFS) that Vince Bonfanti has been building, you can't write to the file system. Note that you can use the VFS on all Java projects on GAE; it isn't specific to OpenBD.
- The limit on the length of a single request is 30 seconds. (Not a problem unless you're generating reports or something.)
- You can't ...
- open a socket or direct connection to another host. You can use GAE's URL Fetch Service to call other hosts on ports 80 and 443.
- spawn new threads
- make system calls
- There are some limitations on request/response sizes, maximum file sizes, etc. but all are quite reasonable.
The big difference is that you can't use a traditional RDBMS like MySQL. Instead you use Google's Datastore, which is a "schemaless object datastore." You can
read more about Datastore here. So what does this mean for CFML developers? Well, OpenBD for GAE implements persistence for CFCs to Google Datastore, so you can save your CFCs (works for structs as well) to the Datastore by using the GoogleWrite() function, and there are also functions to run queries and read single objects from the Datastore. You can read more about OpenBD's Datastore integration on the
OpenBD wiki.
There has also been some work done on making a file-based RDBMS like
H2 work with the VFS, and although it works apparently the performance is pretty slow at the moment. When the issues around that get resolved that will be another nice option, since a database could be deployed to GAE right along with your application code.
Personally I'm really excited about the opportunities this offers CFML developers. It could not be simpler to build a site and deploy it on Google App Engine, and the benefits of being on the Google infrastructure are pretty amazing. If your application doesn't get a huge amount of traffic it's completely free, and if your application starts to grow, the underlying infrastructure will scale up automatically as needed. That's one of the many benefits of cloud computing.
If you're interested in getting started with OpenBD on GAE, make sure and join the
OpenBD Google Group, check out the
GAE section of the wiki, and there are some great blog posts by members of the OpenBD community as well:
As I said, there's lots to love here, so I encourage you to give it a try.
