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Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com

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Re: Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

#21

Post by salimmadjd »

bradleyjg wrote: post #15
salimmadjd wrote: post #13

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. 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 $…

It was the single most requested feature on the bug tracker by quite a bit. It's not something I want, but apparently there are quite a few people who do.

Is this cumulative requests from the past 5 years?

Also what people request and what google's vision is are two different things. Who are they targeting with this PHP stuff. Yes sure, for free-tier stuff, I'm sure lots of kids playing around with PHP would love to have a sand-box to play around. But this move seems inconsistent with their prior action that signaled a move toward enterprise sales.

Also, it feels like one side of google is not talking with the other side. They're building a whole application scripting system hosted on google Drive to work with google apps, etc. Why not provide the javascript on GAE to allow further application development and integration.

To be honest, this feels like: Oh shit! Google I/O is coming up and we need to have something to show than a vision of providing cloud-based computing solution that fits within their big vision.

Re: Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

#22

Post by pestaa »

iguana wrote: post #16
astrodust wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP is only popular because many hosting providers support it. Many hosting providers only support it because it's popular. At no point in this equation does the relative merits of the language itself factor in.

PHP is popular because it's incredibly easy to get started for someone used to doing things with HTML. An HTML page can be renamed to .php, and that is a valid PHP page. For someone trying to go from HTML/CSS to the server side, PHP presents the path of least resistance. When using PHP, a lot of the basic data structure transforms are implemented in the core language. You can integrate simple server side functionalit…

You put it very lightly. It is not pedantry or elitist hackers, it is computer science. A sane engineer with a little bit of experience would not start off with PHP to build anything at all.

Re: Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

#23

Post by cramsdale »

bradleyjg wrote: post #15
salimmadjd wrote: post #13

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. 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 $…

It was the single most requested feature on the bug tracker by quite a bit. It's not something I want, but apparently there are quite a few people who do.

Our goal is to advance computing (via services such as HRD, Cloud Datastore, BigQuery, and Go) in ways that align with existing developer practices (investments in Java and now the release of PHP). There's no point in releasing amazing solutions if there is a huge barrier to entry.

Re: Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

#24

Post by papsosouid »

namityadav wrote: post #18
papsosouid wrote: post #8

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 fo…

When it comes to my (virtual) infrastructure, I want to go with a platform that's stable (including in terms of price), well-tested by others who have similar needs as me, and has a lot of documentation / articles / questions online. And I would never go with a platform that doesn't have all other services that I may need (as you mentioned). Why wait for google replacing SES when you can just go with AWS? MHO, obviou…

Google's offering is significantly faster, and is marginally cheaper is it not? I've had relatively poor experiences with the quality of documentation/articles/questions for AWS, I still haven't managed to get a simple s3 setup working to allow people to upload files through their browser for example. I'm not waiting for google, we're not ready to launch yet. I am just wondering if google will have some of the extra services by the time we are ready.

Re: Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

#25

Post by salimmadjd »

cramsdale wrote: post #23
bradleyjg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the single most requested feature on the bug tracker by quite a bit. It's not something I want, but apparently there are quite a few people who do.

Our goal is to advance computing (via services such as HRD, Cloud Datastore, BigQuery, and Go) in ways that align with existing developer practices (investments in Java and now the release of PHP). There's no point in releasing amazing solutions if there is a huge barrier to entry.

Which customers are you going after? People who want to play around with "hello worlds" with PHP or people who actually build powerful stuff.

Either case, help me understand why PHP was a better choice vs. Javascript? If the question is barrier to entry. Then javascript should have the lowest. Anyone doing any web development needs to do something in HTML/Javascript/CSS.

Additionally you could have made the case for further integration with your other services like App Scripts. Aren't google team talk to each other?

I personally would have rather seen Google focus on Go and remove "experimental" out of Go so people feel some amount of security developing and investing time building Go applications on GAE. Just my $.02!

Re: Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

#26

Post by camus »

astrodust wrote: post #7
yogo wrote: post #2

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. https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=1...

PHP is only popular because many hosting providers support it. Many hosting providers only support it because it's popular. At no point in this equation does the relative merits of the language itself factor in.

PHP is popular because users know it is a good compromise between javaish stuffs ( type hinting in functions and methods , private,protected,public members, interfaces,and abstract classes ) and some whatever dynamic stuff out there ( dynamic , weak typing ) and some weird/functional stuffs ( pointers , closures , callbacks ).

Yes PHP has a lot of bad parts. But its good parts are really really good.

Most hosting providers dont allow serious php development anyway , so it makes little difference. You need a vps or a PAAS to do serious PHP development , like any other solution out there.

I love python and ruby. But I really miss type hinting everytime i use one of these.

Re: Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

#27

Post by xaritas »

papsosouid wrote: post #8

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 fo…

I'm looking at GAE as a AWS alternative too, so what follows is not complete, just a few observations.

Here is the run down on the runtime services available in the Java SDK (I think that it and Python are the most complete, not everything is available for Go last I checked): https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/apis

This is a good supplement: https://developers.google.com/appengine/tools_tips

So queues and email are in, messaging might be served by Google Cloud Messaging or the recently announced Trello partnership. I don't think anything quite like CloudWatch or Route53 is available.

I think of GAE as more like Heroku + add-ons than a straight AWS competitor so I wouldn't expect them to be entirely equivalent. On the other hand more control over the runtime lets them offer things that are entirely out of scope for AWS (channels).

As far as updates, the blog shows the the SDK gets new features fairly frequently: http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/

Re: Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

#28

Post by TheHydroImpulse »

umsm wrote: post #20
iguana wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PHP is popular because it's incredibly easy to get started for someone used to doing things with HTML. An HTML page can be renamed to .php, and that is a valid PHP page. For someone trying to go from HTML/CSS to the server side, PHP presents the path of least resistance. When using PHP, a lot of the basic data structure transforms are implemented in the core language. You can integrate simple server side functionalit…

> For pedantic hackers like us, sure, it's garbage, but for the average person that just wants to get things done, it is pure gold. I disagree. The developers of Wordpress are not "the average person". There are too many production sites that run on PHP to say it's garbage.

Wordpress is garbage. Just because there are a lot of production sites built or using Wordpress doesn't mean it's good. Wordpress is popular because of it's community, use of PHP which allows you to host it on many providers, and a ton of themes and plugins. Wordpress is probably the worst spaghetti code I've ever seen (we'll, close).

Re: Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

#29

Post by PaulMest »

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.

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.

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