Javascript – Redirect to different domain URL (google app engine logout) doesn’t work from silverlight + javascript

[Update April 2016] This answer is now outdated, custom naked domain mapping is supported, see Lawrence Mok's answer.

I have figured it out!

First off: it is impossible to link something like mydomain.com with your appspot app. This is considered a naked domain, which is not supported by Google App Engine (anymore). Strictly speaking, the answer to my question has to be "impossible". Read on...

All you can do is add subdomains pointing to your app, e.g myappid.mydomain.com. The key to get your top level domain linked to your app is to realize that www is a subdomain like any other!

myappid.mydomain.com is treated exactly the same as www.mydomain.com!

Here are the steps:

1. Go to appengine.google.com, open your app
2. Administration > Versions > Add Domain... (your domain has to be linked to your Google Apps account, follow the steps to do that including the domain verification.)
3. Go to www.google.com/a/yourdomain.com
4. Dashboard > your app should be listed here. Click on it.
5. myappid settings page > Web address > Add new URL
6. Simply enter www and click Add
7. Using your domain hosting provider's web interface, add a CNAME for www for your domain and point to ghs.googlehosted.com

Now you have www.mydomain.com linked to your app.

I wished this would have been more obvious in the documentation...Good luck!

You did a great job of summarizing what's awesome about Node.js. My feeling is that Node.js is especially suited for applications where you'd like to maintain a persistent connection from the browser back to the server. Using a technique known as "long-polling", you can write an application that sends updates to the user in real time. Doing long polling on many of the web's giants, like Ruby on Rails or Django, would create immense load on the server, because each active client eats up one server process. This situation amounts to a tarpit attack. When you use something like Node.js, the server has no need of maintaining separate threads for each open connection.

This means you can create a browser-based chat application in Node.js that takes almost no system resources to serve a great many clients. Any time you want to do this sort of long-polling, Node.js is a great option.

It's worth mentioning that Ruby and Python both have tools to do this sort of thing (eventmachine and twisted, respectively), but that Node.js does it exceptionally well, and from the ground up. JavaScript is exceptionally well situated to a callback-based concurrency model, and it excels here. Also, being able to serialize and deserialize with JSON native to both the client and the server is pretty nifty.

I look forward to reading other answers here, this is a fantastic question.

It's worth pointing out that Node.js is also great for situations in which you'll be reusing a lot of code across the client/server gap. The Meteor framework makes this really easy, and a lot of folks are suggesting this might be the future of web development. I can say from experience that it's a whole lot of fun to write code in Meteor, and a big part of this is spending less time thinking about how you're going to restructure your data, so the code that runs in the browser can easily manipulate it and pass it back.

Here's an article on Pyramid and long-polling, which turns out to be very easy to set up with a little help from gevent: TicTacToe and Long Polling with Pyramid.