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This is why we stopped using App Engine frameworks at my gig. I'm not sure why, but they tend to die off rather quickly. App Engine Patch, Kay, and Tipfy have all become unmaintained.

My theory is that the critical mass for App Engine frameworks just isn't there. Most people either use the Django that's packaged with the SDK or straight up webapp (or now, webapp2, which is pretty great). Slicing the already small userbase into those willing to use a third-party framework is just too few people to make maintaining it worthwhile.

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OTOH, webapp2 was incorporated into the platform. There are a lot of interesting things you can do under app engine and, maybe, platforms as monolithic as Django have a hard time living on Google's platform.

I think this is more like it. We use the Django framework at work and I wish we could get rid of it. These big "do all" frameworks seem like a good idea but by the time you've hacked in all of your needs along with GAE's your begin to wonder why you ever started with.

The main reason is portability. The zero-admin scaling Google provides is very tempting and being able to port your Django app to App Engine can be a good advantage.

As well as being able to easily move off GAE if you need to. I think that's the biggest gain.

I don't think webapp2 is a framework, though. It was designed to be compatible with webapp2, and then add some niceties, so it's a drop-in replacement for webapp. Even with webapp2_extras, it doesn't contain half of what Django or Rails does.

And note that the author abandoned Tipfy for it.

No, it doesn't. It's very hard to build something as complete - and as self-dependent - as Django on top of something that moves as fast as Google's App Engine.

The only thing I miss when using Django on EC2 is the automagic zero-admin scaling Google provides. The only thing I miss from Django when using App Engine is the admin (which wouldn't work on top of the datastore anyway)

> The only thing I miss from Django when using App Engine is the admin (which wouldn't work on top of the datastore anyway)

It does, though, it works fine with django-nonrel.

The author of webapp2 and Tipfy is now working on a Go framework called gorilla that happens to run nicely on App Engine:

http://gorilla-web.appspot.com/

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