Hey Brian,

This is  awesome.
Awhile back I took a stab at doing something kinda similar with jruby  
and google app engine. I think I still have a half finished blog post  
floating around somewhere on that....finishing that might be a good  
christmas break project.

For other ruby-based projects, I've had great success with Heroku.  
They also have a solr hosting service...

This is what we did for the OLAC project.  Rails  hosting cost were  
way too much for a pilot project, so we're using the free version of  
heroku.

Also, while I happen to work for a larger university library with VMs  
coming out the wazoo, in my experience, often these types of  
development services really help with collobroration projects,  since  
you're not having to relying on one institution partner to provide the  
support for the development environment. It also kinda makes the  
collaborators more equal at the get-go, since nobody has their  
employer's name etched into to the URL and server names. Also, it  
might make managers a little less spooked about having to support  
things long term....

best,chris


On Dec 16, 2010, at 12:11 AM, BRIAN TINGLE wrote:

> Having been several months since I've tried to run django on the  
> google app engine, I took a crack at it today with Django appengine http://www.allbuttonspressed.com/projects/djangoappengine
>
> Since it is based on django-nonrel, in theory it does not have  
> vendor lock in to app engine, so you could start to develop there  
> and move in house if you need to.
>
> I set up a very simple little app, and it deployed to appspot okay,  
> here is the code and a short screen cast on my blog
>
> screen cast:
> http://tingletech.tumblr.com/post/2334189882/
> demonstrates the django admin interface running in the google app  
> engine editing the super basic models
>
> The super basic models:
> https://github.com/tingletech/collengine/blob/master/items/models.py
>
> code repository:
> https://github.com/tingletech/collengine
>
> Dose anyone know of any other django or app engine based digital  
> library metadata collection tools?  Seems like being able to run for  
> free on app engine (if things fit in google quotas) would be an  
> advantage for small libraries and short term grant funded projects.   
> Also, the django-nonrel looks like is has some interesting search  
> features that could be used in access systems.
>
> Anyway, just throwing this out there in case it might be useful for  
> the hackfest
>
> -- Brian