Popstat on Google App Engine

Popstat is the demo application from my Facebook Dev Garage Dallas presentation. It just posts a status message to Facebook and Twitter to demonstrate using both Facebook Connect and an external service. I developed it on my laptop and didn't have time to move it to a public host before the event. I wanted it out there live someplace and figured it was a good opportunity to try out Google App Engine's Java support (Popstat uses Grails with a mix of Groovy and Java)

I got it all working, but it was a pain.

• I used the Grails AppEngine plugin. I liked it.
• App Engine provides storage, but not in the form of a relational database. It's close enough that JPA and JDO both work (but not Hibernate, yet). I chose JPA, but either way you'll need to annotate your domain classes (I expected the GORM-JPA plugin to do that for me, but it didn't)
• You'll need to put your domain classes into named packages. Things (silently) don't go well if you leave them in the default package.
• If you're using JPA, domain classes will need to explicitly declare an id field. Make it a Long, and add the @Id and @GeneratedValue annotations. Use GenerationType.IDENTITY.
• I was able to use the dynamic save() method provided by GORM-JPA, but I had to wrap up the calls in a withTransaction block, and the semantics are slightly different (use merge() instead of save() for updates)
• Depending on your version of Spring, you may get a message along the lines of "org.springframework. context.annotation. internalPersistenceAnnotationProcessor': Initialization of bean failed" with something about "java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javax/naming/NamingException". The fix here worked for me.
• Popstat uses the facebook-java-api library. Since App Engine forbids the use of JAXB, I had to switch to the JSON version of the client to avoid an error about JAXBContext.
• To talk to Twitter, Popstat uses the oauth-signpost library. But Signpost depends on Apache HttpClient, and HttpClient uses low-level Socket calls forbidden by App Engine. I hacked Signpost to use URLConnection, but I wouldn't recommend that approach. If I had to do it again, I'd look around for an OAuth library that worked out of the box.
• By default, the App Engine Java Development Server (a version of the App Engine environment you can run on your local machine) binds to localhost only. The command line client has a "--address" option, but the "grails app-engine run" command doesn't. I hacked the scripts/AppEngine.groovy plugin and harcoded the address parameter into startDevServer().

There was some other stuff that I didn't take notes on, but (other than registration being turned off) Popstat is doing what it did before.

Overall, though, it wasn't a great experience. Google turns off random bits of Java (for security and ease of management), which means that very few third-party libraries are going to work. You'll probably have to do some porting of your own code as well. That, combined with the admin service being down all morning, left a bad taste. The free hosting thing is great for demo apps but I think I'll stick to something like Amazon EC2 for real work. I'm very curious to see how Microsoft Azure stacks up (it's much more of a direct competitor to App Engine than the roll-it-all-yourself EC2)