Google App Engine + Helma = geekcloud

Lets suppose you are a web developer playing with Server Side JavaScript. It’s pretty obvious that you would like to have some JS hosting :) Right that’s me, and I’m happy to post, that since 15th of April, there is a nice option for us !! This option is Google App Engine. Hosting by Google that provides 500 MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month without billing enabled.

I won’t spend lot’s of lines here, trying to explaining how to make all this possible, cause there is nice post on helma-ng wiki describing all the necessary steps. Unfortunately there are some restrictions on app engine side preventing access to the file system, and as the default persistence module in helma is implemented using filestore it was a problem. Well not anymore as there is and early implementation of persistence module based on app engine data store.

So… back to me, as you might guess I have started experimenting :) Have not done much there yet, as I have dedicated most of my free time to bespin port (see: previous post). But still there’s a link to check out. <geekCloud/> is going to be my new home!!! but for now it’s just a way how my future pet might look like :) Honestly it’s nothing more then a template generation, with a broken links inside. Page is ported from my old but never finished web site. (Don’t tell anybody but I was implementing it using php :) I mentioned template generation, so I will add some more detail, I don’t use helma build-in template engine. Instead I have decided to use an alternative extensible template engine written by Massimiliano Mirra. I’m going to push helma-ng webapp to github as soon as I will get something meaningful and I promise it won’t be yet another CMS!!