I see a lot of people on here wondering why Google would just now add support to PHP. I don't work for Google, but I used to work at Microsoft. When Azure launched it tried to "leapfrog" the other cloud vendors by offering only Platform as a Service (PaaS). It offered superior benefits like high-reliability and geographic redundancy. Though, that was met with limited adoption. Why? Well, one of the major reasons was because it would require developers to write new apps or rewrite their existing apps from the ground up very specific to how Azure wants you to write it. This takes a lot of effort from a very specialized skillset, thus very expensive. Also, since you're writing it for the Azure platform, should you decide to switch to another provider, you'd have to rewrite your app again! What if you had a bad experience with customer support or billing? You'd basically be stuck. So Azure has since started offering Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) options, which has far lower switching costs. This has had much greater traction and builds an ongoing relationship with customers. The customers become more familiar with the Azure platform and support offerings. If they feel good about their IaaS experience, they will consider learning some of the premium features and leverage them when they update their existing apps.<p>I think adding PHP is a strategically smart move by Google to get more people using their cloud platform. Soon there will be new billing relationships signed off by thousands of businesses to host basic apps and WordPress installations. Assuming customers have positive initial experiences with Google's PHP hosting, it will become easier for Google to upsell those businesses to add premium cloud features for more advanced applications over the coming years.
LOL at adding PHP support to app engine almost 5 years later. PHP gets a lot of bashing but you can't deny its popularity, as evidenced by the number of stars.<p><a href="https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=13&colspec=ID%20Type%20Component%20Status%20Stars%20Summary%20Language%20Priority%20Owner%20Log" rel="nofollow">https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=1...</a>
Given Google's reputation of awful customer support, why would anybody want to locked into their platform, especially when you have to do so many things the "app engine" way?
I recently left a job that was focused on developing PHP with a very different philosophy from how I would approach it.<p>I see PHP as a growing and evolving object-oriented programming language. I see it as a language to which design patterns can be applied, for which structured designs can be applied, and which has improved which each major release.<p>I also am keenly aware that it has a legacy and a reputation of being something else, a rapid prototyping environment for programmers that don't have exposure to other systems, and take it as a glorified template language for HTML.<p>But I don't see it that way, I look at projects like <a href="http://reactphp.org/" rel="nofollow">http://reactphp.org/</a> which brings Node.js-style evented programming, native support for ZMQ and websocket, and makes PHP a great language for developing web workers. (Though with some caveats, for instance, I use PHP for my own application because it's dependent on the cpanel xmlapi which is provided in PHP). But that really is my point, you can abstract PHP from it's humble web roots and be a productive programmer in it.
It looks like they have preemptively documented how to install Wordpress: <a href="https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/wordpress" rel="nofollow">https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/wordpress</a><p>I wonder how the performance is -- will they support common cache plugins? If not, I wonder if stock wordpress on GAE will be able to withstand getting frontpage'd on HN/Reddit<p>Edit: Unfortunately, as there is no CloudSQL free tier, there's no way to test it out without paying a small amount.
PHP??? I would have thought javascript or Ruby would have made more sense.It seems like Google is just reacting to requests from 4 years ago.<p>The App Engine has mades some decisions that seem to be contradictory. At one end, they drastically increased their prices and sent a signal the GAE was an enterprise-focused platform.
Now, they're releasing PHP so people can host blogs on it. Really? You want to compete with $5-6/month wordpress hosting solutions.
Who is running the show there?
To all the PHP haters. Feel free to bask in the glory of knowing pointers and monads like the back of your hand, and leave making useful apps and making money to PHP developers. That's fine with me :)
Google Compute Engine - now available for everyone *<p>* Till its gets some traction, whereupon we will either jack up prices by 100% or more, or till some bigshot at Google kills it saying its not 'strategically aligned'.
I like PHP! It's the first OO programing that I learned and paved the way for me learning C, C#, Obj-C...and now I'm studying Java. If it wasn't for Php's loose declarations (as compared to C) than I would have had a harder time to grasp object oriented programming and would've never made it past javascript.
Why does every PHP thread turn into a bashing session? It's not constructive to the conversation. I for one am excited about this. I'm only half way through the docs buy so far I like what I see compared to other PHP PaaS. Except no mbstring.
I cannot possibly hope to express the reasons I dislike PHP better than this comprehensive article: <a href="http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/" rel="nofollow">http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...</a><p>An excerpt:<p>> I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there.<p>> You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in handy sometimes.<p>> You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw part on both sides. Still serviceable though, I mean, you can hit nails with the middle of the head holding it sideways.<p>> You pull out the pliers, but they don’t have those serrated surfaces; it’s flat and smooth. That’s less useful, but it still turns bolts well enough, so whatever.<p>> And on you go. Everything in the box is kind of weird and quirky, but maybe not enough to make it completely worthless. And there’s no clear problem with the set as a whole; it still has all the tools.<p>> Now imagine you meet millions of carpenters using this toolbox who tell you “well hey what’s the problem with these tools? They’re all I’ve ever used and they work fine!” And the carpenters show you the houses they’ve built, where every room is a pentagon and the roof is upside-down. And you knock on the front door and it just collapses inwards and they all yell at you for breaking their door.<p>> That’s what’s wrong with PHP.
I wonder whether the target audience here is developers who want to build a new PHP application from scratch <i>for</i> GAE, or just people who want to install Wordpress? Using GAE adds a development/deployment step, but the lack of deployment fuss is the primary advantage PHP has over anything else.<p>I'm also slightly alarmed that the PHP examples use htmlspecialchars and nothing else. The Python documentation has a whole section on templating with an example autoescaping setup using Jinja2.
I know there's google people floating around HN, does anyone know what the priorities are like as far as adding more services is concerned? I've been planning on launching on AWS, but I'd prefer google. But there's still tons of services google doesn't offer (or I can't find reference to at least). It is basically just alternatives to EC2, S3 and the database thing right now right? Are there plans for replacements for SQS, SNS, SES, route53, cloudwatch, etc?