Next Steps in GAE-AWS SDK

I’ve been getting lots of great feedback on the GAE port of the AWS SDK for Java that I released a few months back as part of a school project I was working on. As I’d hoped, it’s grown way beyond that, and there’s lots of people that have let me know they’re making use of it with GAE. For my part, I’ve been keeping it up-to-date and working within a few days of each new AWS SDK for Java release — all 14 of them!

Unfortunately (as those people are well aware) it’s far from complete, and is actually quite buggy. This is not the AWS SDK’s fault, but rather due to the hacks I needed to put in place to get around GAE’s restrictions and bugs. Regardless of where the blame lies, however, the point is still that it has been holding back the improvements people have been asking for (chief among of them being support for S3).

Today I’m making a “new release” available. Unfortunately it doesn’t include S3 support, which still requires a large amount of rethinking, but it does include a major piece of functionality: suites of integration tests. Setting up test cases for the SDK on App Engine as well as the local Jetty server is a painful and time-consuming process (and don’t assume that those two things behave the same — they don’t at all, with respect to GAE-AWS). It’s been the main thing holding back rapid development. But now you can visit http://gae-aws-sdk-test.appspot.com, enter your AWS credentials, choose some service test suites, and see the current development version of the SDK running on App Engine!

As you can see, they don't all pass yet...

The exact same thing works locally (though you may be surprised to see very different results!) If you don’t feel comfortable sending your AWS credentials to my GAE app, feel free to download the code and run your own instance.

Google has really instilled some testing discipline in me, so I feel much more comfortable now ripping out the innards of the S3 client in order to make it GAE-ready and satisfy some of the requests I’ve been getting. Until then, grab the GAE-AWS SDK for the other 15 or so services and play around with it. Now that there’s a free tier for AWS to go along with free Google App Engine quota, the barrier to entry for cloud computing is at an historic low.

Enjoy!