Breaking out of the Google App Engine Python lock-in? [closed]

Answer 1

The code should be mostly portable (they do a pretty good job of indicating which modules you can't use on AppEngine and which AppEngine-specific code corresponds to which forbidden modules), but the whole point of AppEngine is to get access to Google's infrastructure. There's not much point to writing your code to the AppEngine restrictions if you aren't going to be using their infrastructure.

Answer 2

I did the reverse migration from vanilla Unix to app engine recently very easily by using WHIFF resources. Basically configure anything platform dependant as a resource and then swap/replace the resources on different configurations.

http://piopio.appspot.com/W1000_1000.resources

also see

http://aaron.oirt.rutgers.edu/myapp/docs/W1100_1200.wwiki

for a detailed example of resource swapping/configuration. (note: links may go away eventually, app is experimental.)

Answer 3

AppDrop is a proof of concept port of AppEngine to Amazon Web Services / Elastic Computing completed in April of 2008. It uses a flat file instead of BigTable and runs in a single instance, so there are scaling issues; but it's developer says it took him only four days, and perhaps these limitations can be addressed by others.