At first, Privnote looked like an ideal application for porting to Google App Engine because:
- it's already written in the "official" App Engine platform (Python+Django)
- it's entirely based on a request/response mechanism
- we would forget about scalability problems forever
So we give it a try and implemented a prototype, just to see how it goes, but, in the end, GAE didn't work because:
- it doesn't have support for SSL, which is mandatory for Privnote
- it doesn't support third-party Python C extensions (which we use in Privnote) unless they're pure-python modules
As for scaling Privnote, we''ll have to try other alternatives, but it was a good experience to gain some knowledge about Google App Engine and cloud computing, which are very hot topic these days.