Comment by mmcconnell1618 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmcconnell1618 | Hacker News Reader

I think Azure is the sleeping giant that will allow MS to keep enterprise customers for decades to come. Heroku got traction because they made it dead simple for Rails developers to publish a web application. Azure has the potential to be the same kind of solution when linked with Visual Studio for the Microsoft stack.

Amazon, Rackspace, Google, etc. don't own the entire stack from run time to developer tools to cloud hosting and that gives Microsoft a unique advantage. No, Azure won't be the best cloud solution. No, it won't be the cheapest solution. What it will be is just enough goodness to be like crack to millions of Microsoft developers. It won't be worth their time to figure out how to get running in any other cloud provider when Visual Studio has a "Deploy to cloud" button available.

Microsoft will offer on-premise versions of Azure and some larger customers will adopt it but economies of scale will soon see 3rd party web hosting companies struggling for business. This is were the extra revenue for growth will come from. Microsoft will be making less on license sales and SPLA contracts in favor of locking in hosting revenue.

Google app engine for Java has an Eclipse plugin. So you get a deploy to cloud button of sorts. I still had a distaste for the persistence layer (think hybernate + big tables) but it was easy to use.

The problem with GAE is that it's not quite there yet when it comes to web-app development in Java.

1) Does not have Maven support

3rd party exist, but not from Google

2) As you said it: persistence layer/ORM mismatch with BigTable

You could use Objectify but what are we talking about here: apps that use RDBMS or being dictate by Google what your app architecture should be?

3) Limitations imposed by GAE

There was a time where if you use Spring Framework, once in a while GAE will throw exception due to longer bootstrapping time. Does not support all Java classes and keeping GAE up to date to the latest spec.

What most Java developers want is to support Tomcat/TomEE/JavaEE5+6, deployment via Maven, with RDBMS and less restriction. Up until now, no one in the market (Heroku, CloudFoundry) do this (user-experience) well except Jelastic. Unfortunately Jelastic does not provide infrastructure; they provide the software and work with 3rd-party hosting provider for the infrastructure.

#1 has been addressed; the GAE jars are officially published to the maven central repository.

#2 is a puzzling statement to make. Compared to an RDBMS, GAE's datastore is a much more natural fit for Java object graphs because it supports hierarchical data and is naturally polymorphic. Hibernate makes crazy contortions to match up the models and this complexity bleeds through to the API. There is definitely a learning curve if you have a background in RDBMS development, but you can say the same about MongoDB or Riak or any other NoSQL store. Nevertheless, the benefits of an autoscaling, distributed, replicated, zero-administration datastore are compelling.

#2a If you really really want MySQL, GAE now offers it (Cloud SQL).

#3 is a bit ambiguous - yes, there are limitations, as there are in any hosted environment. There's a 60s deadline on startup requests, but it's not usually hard to keep even Spring apps under this limit. The missing Java classes are things like Swing - you won't miss them. Yes, things like the Servlet spec are a little old, but the servlet api hasn't changed in any material way in the last decade.

It's not perfect, but App Engine is still an awesome platform for startups. It eliminates ops and devops roles so you spend all your time writing features.

#2 it's not that puzzling. Plain and simple most of us want RDBMS not NoSQL.

#2a they _just_ offer this (private/invite beta since last year). And no, I want PostgreSQL ;)

#3 In the past, JAXB doesn't work well, ditto with some of the reflection stuff.

List of unsupported stuff: http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/wiki/WillItPlayInJa...

No JMX, JMS, JAX-WS (server), iText (PDF generation). Various libraries seem to require little "tweaks" here and there, no, I want to get it from Maven and be done with it.

The problem is keeping up to date with the latest spec fast enough.

I'm not looking for perfect though, I'm looking for standard JavaEE stuff.

You sound like someone who has arrived at a steakhouse and is upset because they don't have Big Macs on the menu. Okay... you have very specific desires and GAE isn't that. That isn't necessarily a problem with GAE.

Can't argue with your assessment but the top parent of our thread talks about Azure and Heroku where both platform support fully whatever their bread-and-butter (Azure with .NET and Heroku with Rails), meanwhile GAE does not.

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