I am trying to create a MVP (minimal viable product). Is the Google App Engine a good framework to use?

I am trying to create a MVP (minimal viable product).. Is the Google App Engine a good framework to use?

My project amounts to a vertical Q and A开发者_如何转开发 site not unlike Quora. Just as on Quora, I want users to be able to follow other users and follow topics. All questions will be tagged in one of 15 topics.

If Google App Engine is not a good framework for this sort of project, what would you suggest? I have also considered Django and Amazon Web Services.

It is important to note that I have minimal programming experience (primarily in Java and MySQL). However, I am willing to learn whatever language would be most useful.

There's nothing about a Q&A site that's intrinsically poorly suited to App Engine - in fact, my talk at the Stack Overflow Dev Day 2009 in Amsterdam was "How to write a Stack Overflow Clone on App Engine in under an hour".

You appear to be confusing different layers of the stack, though: Django is a framework; App Engine is a platform, and AWS is infrastructure. You can use Django on App Engine.

GAE has some limitations. It all depends on the specifics of your product. For example, GAE puts strict limits on how long you can keep connections to 3rd party servers open. Is this something you'd need to do?

So, I would advise you to read up on GAE's various limitations and find out if they're a problem for you or not, based on your initial design.

Another point to consider is the tie-in. If your minimal product is successful, most likely you'll want to continue developing it, instead of rewriting from scratch. If you rely on GAE's various proprietary storage, bg workers, etc. it's going to be that much harder to switch. This, incidentally, is the main reason I opted out of GAE for my own app. It's cheap enough these days to get your own hosted virtual server at some cloud provider and you can use Django anyway, of course, so GAW might not have that much added value for you.