Is porting a Django app to GAE still an option?

Question

I have started a month ago with GAE and have successfully deployed our current startup via Flask on GAE. It works fantastically well. Now being all too exited about GAE, I am thinking about porting a couple of my older Django apps on GAE as well.

To my surprise the documentation of it is surprisingly inconsistent and partially contradicting.

The official google page recommends using django-nonrel, which itself is already disconstinued.

Django 1.5.1 seems not even to be supported yet on GAE, neither is it clear to me how to use Django 1.4.3 on GAE.

I also found this more recent solution that utilizes Django and Google Cloud (Mysql on cloud) instead of the high replication datastore. Not sure if this is a good way to go since its still experimental and subject to "breaking changes" in future. (It also doesn't seem to include any free tier, unlike high replication datastore)

I was expecting Django - as perhaps the biggest python web frameworks - to have a far better documentation or tutorials about how to do deploy it on GAE. So I wonder if its even worth it sticking with Django on GAE anymore.

If I am meant to make manually my own models and adjust my queries in Views by utilizing ndb anyway, I could as well stick with flask+Jinja2, why should I use Django, where I can't even use it's ORM anymore? Or am I overlooking something?

Thanks,

Answer 1

There's some work going on in maintaining django-nonrel, though the Allbuttonspressed blog is starting to get pretty out of date. You'll find more up-to-date info in the django-nonrel mailing list on Google Groups.

I believe it's been updated to at least Django 1.5, but I'm personally still running on 1.4. The documentation is extremely lacking. You'll have to figure out from the mailing list the appropriate branch to use to get support for the latest django version. However, it's there and it's working.

Django + CloudSQL will likely be the least-coding route to port your app to GAE.

Django-nonrel gets to take advantage of the HRD, however, many apps written expecting SQL behavior will need to be extensively rewritten to support the HRD behavior properly.

As an example, I've tried running django-registration on django-nonrel. On first look, it seems to work fine. But on deeper inspection, there's issues like being able to register the same email address to more than one user on HRD. You may find similar issues with other apps, or just the inability to run at all, given that the HRD doesn't support many-to-many relations, as well as slightly-more-complex queries.

Answer 2

There's nothing on the link to the allbuttonspressed blog that implies it is discontinued. On the contrary, the page says that even though they (as the original maintainers) are pulling out of the project, it has been taken over by a new maintainer. That's what often happens in open-source projects.

As for Cloud SQL, there is a dedicated page on the App Engine documentation which explains in detail how to get this up and running. The Cloud SQL API itself is, it's true, still in "experimental" status, but again that's just what Google does. App Engine itself only came out of "experimental" last year.

As for why you should stick with Django, that's up to you of course, but both of the above solutions will give you Django forms, the admin interface, templates, and URL routing, and some or all of the ORM syntax.