Monday July 13, 2009

Google App Engine Urlfetch problem, possible impact on Google Docs/Spreadsheets

I'm trying out Google App Engine for Java with a small app that uses the ROME library to fetch some RSS feeds from my blogs. It's pretty cool when it does work, not least because my own Java hosting provider who hosts *this* blog firewalls off outgoing traffic, thus GAE represents one way to get around this limitation without having to pay for an entire dedicated server or say, VPS hosting.

I've been having some intermittent problems with the Urlfetch service on the Google App Engine in the past few days. Most RSS fetches would go through but some would fail with exceptions that go something like this :

Uncaught exception from servlet
java.io.IOException: Unknown
at com.google.appengine.api.urlfetch.URLFetchServiceImpl.handleApplicationException(URLFetchServiceImpl.java:56)
at com.google.appengine.api.urlfetch.URLFetchServiceImpl.fetch(URLFetchServiceImpl.java:30)
...

At the same time, over the past few days and particularly over the weekend when I was trying to update some spreadsheets online over at Google Docs, I have noticed that many of my automatically-updated currency/exchange rate cells would have errors/invalid values.

Now this is just speculation, but given the way Google's cloud is supposed to work, if platform updates are supposed to be almost instantly deployed and available across the entire cloud, perhaps the converse may be true - that platform errors are also instantly visible and affects the entire cloud. So this Urlfetch problem may well have an impact on Google Docs spreadsheets that pull data from elsewhere, such as those cells that automatically grab the latest forex exchange rate figures and populate them into my spreadsheets.

Now these are pretty early days yet for cloud computing, whether from Google, Amazon or anyone else, but it's something to think about if you are considering jumping onto the latest-and-greatest tech-fashion-bandwagon :)

See also :

1. How to insert currency exchange rates into Google Spreadsheets
2. Google App Engine System Status

(2009-07-13 11:43:18 SGT) [Java] Permalink

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