A test of Google App Engine’s free Java hosting

Shared web hosting for Java (e.g. Apache Tomcat) has generally been more expensive and complex than PHP and basic web hosting. But I’ve recently discovered Google App Engine now offers free hosting for low-traffic sites, with cloud-style pricing for resource use as traffic increases. It’s a very unique service, you have to use their object store instead of MySQL for example, and you need a special appengine configuration file. To try it out, I adapted my simple Jeocoder project to run on AppEngine (you can try it out here).

“JEOCODER” is free sample Java code for determining longitude and latitude from a North American address that works with geocoding services provided by GEOCODER.CA and GEOCODER.US. The code was written by Doug Carmichael for my Gigazad project, where we used it for managing geographically-targeted advertising. GEOCODER.CA offers sample code in other languages, and has a link to my site for our Java version.

It was trivial to get Jeocoder running on appengine. More complex applications could be a challenge… apparently the database doesn’t support joins in queries! It will be interesting to see how Google cloud services evolve vs Amazon and the others.

If I had time I would write a review of Google Sites, which was a breeze to use to create and host a simple web site, www.augcom.ca, for free with no advertising.  The only catch seems to be that there are a set of Google links at the bottom (Sign in | Terms | Report Abuse | Print page | Powered by Google Sites).