Gábor's blog

As many other people, i also got my google app account (even crateated a stupid test application. it’s fun to try out such a radically different hosting-environment.

but there is an issue with it seems many do not realize:

the “database” backend of google-app-engine (i will call it BigTable in the following text) is not a relational (read “SQL”) store, and it will never be. for example, it does not support SQL JOINs. but it’s worse than that. because of it’s architecture, JOINS will never be fast there. BigTable is essentially a collection of spreadsheet-tables, where you can do some basic searches, that’s all. oh, and transactions.

for this reason, there probably never will be a BigTable django-ORM wrapper. of course technically it’s possible to implement in python all the missing features, but it’s performance characteristics will not be the same as of a relational-database.

Probably many of you have heard already about Seaside. It’s a smalltalk web framework, where you can write a web-app in a linear style:

let’s say you want to create a web-app which:

• shows a form to the user, where he can enter a number and submit it
• then you show him a second form, where the user can enter a second number and submit it
• then you show the user a page which displays the sum of those 2 submitted numbers