Keywords: SQLFORM.grid, GAE, fluxflex, Amazon SQLFORM.grid is great. Love it and use it. However, i loved it so much i left GAE to use it (for now). GAE has search limitations as it is on free text and the use of OR - which puts a damper on the out of the box .grid web2py functionality and custom search generally. I wanted search exactly as .grid does it and another grid was much cleaner with a join, so I just skipped on GAE for the moment until free text search (which is in google's queue to add) entices me back to consider it for this purpose. But GAE made things so easy on my deployment, I was wavering whether to "fix" things for GAE sake; I decided on new ground for my lazy deployment.
I quickly moved to fluxflex to give it a whirl*. It was very simple to get a free domain with web2py up and running - I ran into difficulties however due to the fact that, at least for my free account (and not touching the web server configuration - if that is even possible on a free account), Apache didn't let me transfer anything in over 128kb. After stripping my app of every graphic, I was - with trial and error - able to get it to load through the admin app. Note that anything over 1mb will get you a request too large error - i was rather lucky to get this error since later after trimming to 512kb I got a much less descriptive apache error, and then only after trial and error did i find the real boundary. You should not have this trouble if you build the app in the admin app on the servers, or it is lightweight - but there may be an appliance or two that gives you trouble here. (This is all assuming there is nothing special to my situation, but i rather doubt this - this was my out of the box fluxflex experience.) Checking my app, i found that this 128 limit (in fact, my experience was that the item should round to 127kb), applied to uploaded fields for photos too. One photo around 450kb was blocked, prompting me to reset the upload field sizes at 128, which thanks to web2py on fluxflex i could correct in the code on the fly. I realized that a web2py hack came back to haunt me. On GAE, I believe you can get away with them (in the short term) but of course, with a predefined (and legitimate) web2py instance, any modifications you make under gluon will disappear. I don't make such hacks usually, but I wanted .grid functionality which wasn't yet supported. Any comments are welcome. My only question regards integration of a GAE/Fluxflex style cloud service with data intensive functionality. GAE and Fluxflex both seem rather limited in their storage offering, while Amazon seems rather good for data storage and services - can we have the best of both worlds by somehow having an alternative host for our upload data fields, while still maintaining access control?
