Gaelyk again

Gaelyk is gaining ground as a Google AppEngine framework. Developer Works has Java Development 2.0: Gaelyk for Google App Engine by Andrew Glover. This title emphasizes that Java is more of a platform than a language. I tried this a few months ago, but was disappointed by the initial load times. The application runs fine once it loaded, but my application doesn't get many hits, so most users ended up hitting a cold site.

One solution is to regularly ping the site with a service like Pingdom with something like a 1 minute interval. This seems like overkill to me, but 43,200 pings a month is still well below the roughly 500,000 hits per month that triggers payments. A Basic Pingdom account is $9.95 per moth and there is also a free account that would be fine for a single site. In addition, Groovy 1.7 as improvements for faster compilation. So the performance issues are getting resolved.

The joy of Gaelyk is getting to use the AppEngine features with a minimum of Fuss. Pratik Patel's screencast shows how to build a basic CRUD application. This is also shown nicely in the Gaelyk tutorial. Recently, Gaelyk introduced plugins in version 0.4. There is also a great tutorial about adding REST via JSON and Jackson. It also seems like it should be reasonably easy to integrate with RESTClient.