Hi. I am from above mentioned TheDeadline-Team! We can definitly recommend Google App Engine. The SDK is really cool and you don't have to care about managing

Hi. I am from above mentioned TheDeadline-Team! We can definitly recommend Google App Engine. The SDK is really cool and you don't have to care about managing servers. Scaling is easy. Its (almost) automatic. The datastore is a natural fit for Clojure datastructures, but you have to learn how to structure your data for a distributed key-value store: When you structure your data, you have to think about what has to be in the same transaction (entity-group) and at the same time you have to think about reducing data-dependencies to minimize contention. But when you have lots of data, this is what you have to do anyway. For me, it is much more fun than using an RDBMS. (Read this: http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/appengine/docs/python/datastore/transactions.html http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/appengine/docs/python/data...) We did the whole system in Clojure, so you really can write large systems using Clojure/GAE. It works! (Although the UI is simple, TheDeadline is a complex piece of software e.g. containing a self-written rule-based expert-system, a production system, very similar to LISA http://lisa.sourceforge.net/. http://lisa.sourceforge.net/.) The functional paradigm means less code and makes it easier to build powerful abstractions. You don't have to write lots of boiler-plate code like in Java and Clojure is more concises and much more powerful than Python. (Stop! I don't want to start a programming language discussion now! :) ). We will soon post some Clojure examples and some free software libraries for GAE. If you are interested, just follow our blog H.W.A. (http://www.hackers-with-attitude.com http://www.hackers-with-attitude.com) and/or try out http://the-deadline.appspot.com http://the-deadline.appspot.com to get the "feeling". ;)