These last days I have started working in my new pet project. It's driven mostly by the personal need to fulfill my own problem and wondering if it can benefit other users as well.
For this project, I need to use some mapping servcie that provides map display, directions and rich javascript control. I was looking around the two major maps api's and couldn't but agree with Carol Bartz 's view that Yahoo! Maps can't even compare to the feature set of the Google Maps API. I was truly amazed by the number and quality of features the gmaps API provides and the rich integration with everything google. From analytics to adsense to the Google AJAX API among others...
The other dilemma I am facing this period is how to architect the system. In one sense it could be a javascript only solution but this would severely limit the feature set of the system. One of the features I would like to have is obviously as a platforms guy to be able to collect visitor's raw web server log data and analyze them. This seems to be impossible with google analytics, at least up to the point of an apache web log record can provide you.
Also, I evaluated the usage of google app engine for hosting this project. For my personal pet projects I am usually either storing them on my own git server along with documentation in my twiki server that comes from the same apache server from my old netbook style dell laptop =) But for a project like this, I would like to be potentially able to serve more than just me. Even if it's just friends that find this service as useful as I do.
Google app engine sounds like a good candidate. You can write your code in python or java ( both good options for my style ), you can server enough requests per day for a pet project and if needed you can scale out by paying a (small?) price.
I am still undecided which way I should go. I have started hacking on my dev box but I might soon move over to app engine.
Another nifty feature of the app engine is that it accepts java bytecode instead of source code. This means that pretty much every language that has bindings into jvm can run in this environment.
All in all, google app engine is great but it still lacks some features to make it flexible enough for me. Nonetheless, it provides a turn key solution that alleviates you from many problems. I will post sometime later regarding how did it go...:)
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