GAE Webapp or Django-nonrel?

Question

I want to host my personal site which will mainly have a blog, gallery component as well as code snippets and demos.I've chosen GAE because it offers free hosting for a reasonably scaled website(i.e. personal sites).

I initially thought it could host Django applications without any modifications and since I have some experience in Django it'd be easy for me to deploy a site. However, upon further research I discovered that this was not the case and it requires some "hacks" to host a Django site on GAE.

Additionally, upon looking at a few implementations of webapps it seems that GAE is probably a lot simpler and not as daunting as the documentation made it out to be: https://github.com/ccarpenterg/todolist/wiki

So my questions are these:

• Is there any benefit to using Django over GAE Webapps?
• Are the benefits worth the overhead cost - if there is even an overhead cost?
• Am I correct in thinking that GAE Webapps have a negligible learning curve and are probably easier to implement than Django apps?

Answer 1

There are a few good reasons to use Django over webapp:

• Portability - Using a general purpose framework makes it easier to move an existing app between App Engine and a traditional hosting provider.
• Features - Django is a more robust framework with more bells and whistles.

The drawback, though, is that you're a second class citizen. Most Django users are working with a SQL backend, and most App Engine users use webapp. Places where the framework and the platform don't align are going to be less important to the developers of both.

Unless you have a compelling reason to use Django, I would stick with webapp.