The Security Wombles strike AGAIN!

Yet again a great idea spoilt by sheer bloody stupidity!

For some bizarre reason the Security Wombles at Google have decided in their infinite wisdom that you cannot write files on App Engine! I suspect they will use the excuse that it is a security issue, which is frankly b*****ks.

Do they not think that many people use files in their applications? I now have to completely change the persistence model of my application to work around this mind-numbing stupidity. But, it gets worse ... I persist data as XML files and then use XSLT to generate AJAX / HTML files that are the presentation tier.

So not only do I have to completely change my persistence layer, but I now have to completely re-architect my presentation tier. If I want to go ahead and put my application on app engine I am now going to have to write way more code than I have in my current app, it will be more not less expensive to develop and maintain and will require more processing capacity rather than less, and will be less responsive to user requests.

My advice right now to any one considering App Engine would have to be, don't bother. For all the talk of adopting Open Standards, the platform is not as open as they would have you believe.

I am going to deploy my code on EC2 with Tomcat / Apache - it supports the full Java API, you can even write files!!!!!

! Google Dudes - if you are reading this you have to fix this; I will be actively advising my clients to avoid App Engine and go for EC2 until this is fixed!