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Ask HN: Any Famous Webapp Made with Java and Google App Engine?

7 points by gcatalfamo 9y ago

crispytx 9y ago
I believe Google's search engine was originally written in Java if you're looking for an inspiring Java webapp. App engine obviously didn't exist yet though.
niftich 9y ago
Snapchat [1][2]. Streak [3][4][5]. Various apps from Floreysoft [6]. Google Cloud Platform has a customer showcase at https://cloud.google.com/customers/ https://cloud.google.com/customers/ [7] and issuing a site-limited search with the terms 'java' and 'app engine' finds good results. [1] https://gigaom.com/2013/05/07/snapchats-act-of-faith-in-building-on-google-compute-engine/ https://gigaom.com/2013/05/07/snapchats-act-of-faith-in-buil... [2] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/19/magnusson_snapchat/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/19/magnusson_snapchat/ [3] http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/10/streak-brings-crm-to-inbox-with-google.html http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/10/streak-brings-cr... [4] https://cloud.google.com/customers/streak/ https://cloud.google.com/customers/streak/ [5] https://www.streak.com/ https://www.streak.com/ [6] https://cloud.google.com/customers/floreysoft/ https://cloud.google.com/customers/floreysoft/ [7] https://cloud.google.com/customers/ https://cloud.google.com/customers/
- alooPotato 9y ago
  Not sure if we, Streak, are famous but yes we are on Java app engine. Happy to answer any questions....
  - niftich 9y ago
    Were you able to use popular off-the-shelf libraries in your codebase without any trouble, or did App Engine's different JVM give you issues? How much App Engine-specific code is in your product? Would it be a very large undertaking to migrate off of App Engine? Besides autoscaling, what is the feature of App Engine that you've found most useful?
    - alooPotato 9y ago
      We've used almost all libraries with no issues. The only problematic ones are those that try to implement networking code on their own. Appengine has some limitations on the type of networking calls you can do but most libraries support delegating that work. The new Java 8 runtime has A LOT of these restrictions removed. There is very little appengine specific code in our app with the exception of our data layer. Because we use AppEngine datastore (the only option at the time), we are pretty tied to it. I feel like migrating cloud platforms is always a large undertaking and appengine would be no different. If we were starting today, we'd probably consider using Cloud SQL or Spanner, but the good thing now is that you have a choice. Aside from the autoscaling, the idea of never thinking about machines is really nice. We never think about OS's, patches, networking, etc. The other nice benefit is the deployment story. You can organize your application into services, deploy them individually, traffic split between version, rollback quickly, setup staging, etc. Its very well implemented and the fact that we never think about it is really nice.

7 points by gcatalfamo 9y ago

I believe Google's search engine was originally written in Java if you're looking for an inspiring Java webapp. App engine obviously didn't exist yet though.

niftich 9y ago

Snapchat [1][2]. Streak [3][4][5]. Various apps from Floreysoft [6]. Google Cloud Platform has a customer showcase at https://cloud.google.com/customers/ https://cloud.google.com/customers/ [7] and issuing a site-limited search with the terms 'java' and 'app engine' finds good results. [1] https://gigaom.com/2013/05/07/snapchats-act-of-faith-in-building-on-google-compute-engine/ https://gigaom.com/2013/05/07/snapchats-act-of-faith-in-buil... [2] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/19/magnusson_snapchat/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/19/magnusson_snapchat/ [3] http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/10/streak-brings-crm-to-inbox-with-google.html http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2012/10/streak-brings-cr... [4] https://cloud.google.com/customers/streak/ https://cloud.google.com/customers/streak/ [5] https://www.streak.com/ https://www.streak.com/ [6] https://cloud.google.com/customers/floreysoft/ https://cloud.google.com/customers/floreysoft/ [7] https://cloud.google.com/customers/ https://cloud.google.com/customers/

alooPotato 9y ago
Not sure if we, Streak, are famous but yes we are on Java app engine. Happy to answer any questions....
- niftich 9y ago
  Were you able to use popular off-the-shelf libraries in your codebase without any trouble, or did App Engine's different JVM give you issues? How much App Engine-specific code is in your product? Would it be a very large undertaking to migrate off of App Engine? Besides autoscaling, what is the feature of App Engine that you've found most useful?
  - alooPotato 9y ago
    We've used almost all libraries with no issues. The only problematic ones are those that try to implement networking code on their own. Appengine has some limitations on the type of networking calls you can do but most libraries support delegating that work. The new Java 8 runtime has A LOT of these restrictions removed. There is very little appengine specific code in our app with the exception of our data layer. Because we use AppEngine datastore (the only option at the time), we are pretty tied to it. I feel like migrating cloud platforms is always a large undertaking and appengine would be no different. If we were starting today, we'd probably consider using Cloud SQL or Spanner, but the good thing now is that you have a choice. Aside from the autoscaling, the idea of never thinking about machines is really nice. We never think about OS's, patches, networking, etc. The other nice benefit is the deployment story. You can organize your application into services, deploy them individually, traffic split between version, rollback quickly, setup staging, etc. Its very well implemented and the fact that we never think about it is really nice.