Using Java in Google App Engine, what's the best way to store and access large, static data?

Question

I have my most of my apps "dynamic" data stored in the datastore.

However, I also have a large collection of static data that would only change with new builds of the app. A series of flat files seems like it might be simpler than managing it in the datastore.

Are there standard solutions to this? How about libraries to make loading/parsing this content quick and easy? Does it make more sense to push this data to the datastore? Which would perform better?

Anyone else have this problem and have war stories they can share?

Answer 1

Everything depends on how you need to use the information.

I for instance have an application that needs to have a starting state provided from static data. Since I wanted this static data to be easily prepared outside the application, I put the data as spreadsheets on Google Docs and then I have an administrative function in my web app to load the starting state through Google Docs Spreadsheet API to objects in the datastore. It works fairly well, although there are some reliability issues that I haven't quite worked out yet (I sometimes need to restart the process).

In other cases, you might get away with just including the data as static property/xml files and load them through the standard Java resource APIs (getResourceAsStream and such). I haven't tried this approach though since it wasn't meaningful in my particular situation.