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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

#71

Post by dragonwriter »

fletchowns wrote: post #54
pjscott wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have an application that happens to fit nicely into the App Engine Way, it's a pretty slick environment for deployment.

Yes, I have no argument with you that it is quite slick. It seems the benefit still does not outweigh the cost though. I can't even imagine running into a critical issue with paying customers demanding answers from me while I am subjected to Google's customer service. Plus there's no way to failover from App Engine to some other platform if your app is locked into the "App Engine Way". The only thing I would consider…

> Plus there's no way to failover from App Engine to some other platform if your app is locked into the "App Engine Way".

Well, except that there is an open-source alternative implementation of App Engine that you can run anywhere you want. [1] Which kind of ruins the whole "no way to failover from App Engine to some other platform" argument, even for apps built the "App Engine Way".

[1] http://www.appscale.com/

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

#72

Post by Legion »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #65
pestaa wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Facebook. Wikipedia. Yahoo.

pestaa's comment needs to be amended. It should read: "A sane engineer with a little bit of experience would not start off with PHP to build anything at all in 2013."

Facebook's former CTO has said that the only reason Facebook is still on PHP still today is legacy. It wouldn't be written in PHP if it were started today.

PHP once was the right tool for the job, but those years have passed. We have many better options now.

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

#73

Post by ajessup »

manacit wrote: post #4

It looks like they have preemptively documented how to install Wordpress: https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/wordpress 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 Edit: Unfortunately, as there is no CloudSQL free tier, there's no way to test it out without paying a small a…

AJ here, a PM on App Engine (and the guy who wrote the tutorial). The Batcache plugin (which caches to Memcache) works on GAE out of the box, and gives a predictable improvement to performance, especially when you've got a lot of DB-heavy plugins.

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

#74

Post by dragonwriter »

salimmadjd wrote: post #21
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.

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…

> Also what people request and what google's vision is are two different things.

Google's vision is "developers deploying scalable apps on App Engine". Being developer-friendly is good for that.

> Who are they targeting with this PHP stuff.

Existing PHP devs. Which is a lot of devs.

> 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.

Lots of apps that end up making money use PHP.

> But this move seems inconsistent with their prior action that signaled a move toward enterprise sales.

Enterprise is an area that Google would like to get their Cloud Platform, including App Engine, more sales in, but its never been anywhere close to their sole target for it.

> They're building a whole application scripting system hosted on google Drive to work with google apps, etc.

"Building"? Apps Script has been around a long time (longer than Drive itself; maybe longer than App Engine.)

> Why not provide the javascript on GAE to allow further application development and integration.

Javascript on GAE would make a lot of sense, too (especially in light of App Script and Google's work on V8 and the emerging popularity of Node.) So would Dart-on-GAE. I wouldn't be surprised if either (or both) of those happened. But the fact that it makes sense doesn't make PHP make any less sense.

> To be honest, this feels like: Oh shit! Google I/O is coming up and we need to have something to show

App Engine PHP wasn't even the big Cloud Platform announcement tied to I/O; general availability of the Compute Engine IaaS (and the associated new pricing and instance types for Clound Engine) was the big Cloud Platform news.

> than a vision of providing cloud-based computing solution that fits within their big vision.

Google's big vision for cloud-based computing is, well, big. It includes more than one kind of solution, for more than one market segment.

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

#75

Post by landr0id »

nostrademons wrote: post #68
fletchowns wrote: post #35

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?

You can run Django on top of AppEngine and port your app to any number of Django hosts with minimal changes. I just talked to a startup founder who started out on AppEngine and just recently switched to Heroku.

Did you happen to ask why they decided to move from AppEngine to Heroku?

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

#76

Post by dragonwriter »

bradleyjg wrote: post #36
salimmadjd wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can host HTML, javascript and CSS files to be run in the browser on GAE already, and have been able to do so since day 1. What you can't do is run javascript server side. Given the unique requirements of server side javascript, and the fact that the single dominant implementation is maintained by a competitor in this exact space, it isn't a great fit.

> Given the unique requirements of server side javascript, and the fact that the single dominant implementation is maintained by a competitor in this exact space, it isn't a great fit.

Google already has a cloud based, server-side, javascript platform in Apps Script, and has purchased at least one company that operated a JavaScript PaaS, so its not like doing JavaScript serverside is out of Google's reach if they strategically wanted to do it.

I can see why, given the mass of PHP apps out there, PHP might be a priority for App Engine given what App Engine already supports, but I can't see JavaScript as having a significant barrier to practicality.

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

#77

Post by duaneb »

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.

I just wouldn't have guessed the people who requested PHP would use much resources—if you're scaling, you probably know better than to use PHP in the first place.

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

#78

Post by nostrademons »

landr0id wrote: post #75
nostrademons wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can run Django on top of AppEngine and port your app to any number of Django hosts with minimal changes. I just talked to a startup founder who started out on AppEngine and just recently switched to Heroku.

Did you happen to ask why they decided to move from AppEngine to Heroku?

Didn't offhand - I just saw him in the hallway for 5 minutes or so while he was in town for I/O.

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

#79

Post by gambler »

salimmadjd wrote: post #21
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.

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…

"Lots of kids playing around with PHP" "People who want to play around with "hello worlds" with PHP"

Your attitude is ridiculously arrogant.

PHP powers most non-corporate website on the web. The wast majority of wikis, blogs and forums. You know, things that are used for actual communication and knowledge sharing by millions of people.

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

#80

Post by mikeash »

JoeKM wrote: post #42
tekacs wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Popularity, yes. I'd argue it largely comes from amateurish developers, though. It can be used at scale, of course[1] but surely it's popularity is as a result of the hordes of amateur developers and shoddy PHP apps, hacks, script repositories and general, unmaintainable spaghetti code? braces for downvotes (I did try to be fairly balanced, to be fair) [1]: the wisdom of doing this left to the reader. Thought: ah, my…

I never understood the simultaneous hate of PHP and praising of JavaScript. They're both awful languages that are popular because amauteur programmers can easily get started and churn apps. There is just as much, if not more, horribly written spaghetti JavaScript out there, even by Rails and Python developers, as there is horrible PHP code. The only reason people don't belittle JavaScript (as much) is because there a…

There's awful, and then there's PHP.

JavaScript isn't a great language, but it's OK. Maybe "awful", but lots of languages are.

PHP, on the other hand, is in a class of its own, far worse than JavaScript or any other mainstream language I've experienced.

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