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What are the missing features in App Engine?

10 points by surendra_sedhai ↗ HN
i think fulltext search is very fundamental and essential thing for a web application . i put a lot of effort to bring fulltext search to my site.

what are things which are essential for a web application is not present in App Engine?

16 comments

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MatthewPhillips
Not sure I'd call them essential but my 3 biggest pet peeves:

1) No threading. I feel they could find a way to sandbox these without hurting performance.

2) No support for the WebSocket API.

3) No support for Go. This one is a bigger mystery to me; seems like a win-win for the community and for Google.

evangineer
+1 on WebSockets.

Go isn't stable enough yet. There's a new release every month or so and weekly snapshot releases available.

miloco
Ability to backup and restore the datastore via the dashboard. This is long overdue. I know the bulkloader exists but it's hardly ideal.
surendra_sedhai
Yes, datastore backup and restore using bulkloader is not comfortable. For getting backup in local machine i am using bulkloader. However, i am doing online backup using backup(dummy) appengine project. I am coping data back and forth between production and backup projects for backup and restore purpose. Its comparatively easier.
vanni
SSL access on non-appspot.com domains, i.e. HTTPS on custom domains (on their roadmap, BTW)
europa
Oauth or Authsub for appengine operations.

For example I want to deploy an app on appengine for a user without asking him his userid and a password.

Use case: User comes to a site. Search for available applications to install. Click install; give permission, application installed to his appengine account.

QuantumDoja
1. At first for me it was a centralized database, If two apps want to access the same data, what are you going to do? We got around it by making an API.

2. A module for google checkout, I'm still trying to find a Python one for PayPal.

3. +1 For the HTTPS on custom domains

4. +1 To import and export databases

runjake
Stability & speed. My apps randomly kick out various HTTP 500 errors. Sometimes database speed isn't so slick.
miloco
Are you using the new HR datastore? Since I switched reliability has been great.
runjake
No, but I will give it a try with a test build, thanks!
znt
An API for accessing dynamic instances would be so useful for me. I'm developing a library with layered model storage (local cache,memcache, datastore) and cached query functionality on App Engine and using the power of local cache forces me to do some heavy cache invalidation.

If only there was a way to loop through all instances and refresh/invalidate values.

Here's the project if you're interested: https://github.com/ocanbascil/Performance-AppEngine