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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

#81

Post by elithrar »

dragonwriter wrote: post #71
fletchowns wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

> Well, except that there is an open-source alternative implementation of App Engine that you can run anywhere you want.

To be fair, AppScale is a separate entity and therefore there's no guarantee that they will keep up with GAE API's, API bugs, and/or quirks. These are obviously things out of their control, but I'm saying this because there's still no guarantee of a 1:1 replacement if you need to move away.

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

#82

Post by dchest »

ajessup wrote: post #73
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.

As Cloud SQL will provide it's own security features

its

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

#83

Post by jbarham »

threeseed wrote: post #44
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…

It's been years since Google actually released something useful on GAE. All while AWS has blown it away with an array of new systems e.g. SWF, EMR, Glacier, Transcoder. I always liked what Google was getting at with GAE i.e. a simpler, more cohesive AWS. But it just doesn't seem like Google has its heart in it. And we all know what happens to products like that at Google.

> It's been years since Google actually released something useful on GAE.

Do try to keep up: https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/wiki/SdkReleaseNot...

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

#84

Post by adambard »

I cannot possibly hope to express the reasons I dislike PHP better than this comprehensive article: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

An excerpt:

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

> That’s what’s wrong with PHP.

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

#85

Post by jsdalton »

ajessup wrote: post #73
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.

That's a nice tutorial and the idea of running Wordpress on GAE is intriguing to say the least.

I apologize that I have not closely familiarized myself with Google Cloud SQL. Is it really API compatible with MySQL, or are there limitation that one is bound to run into when one starts adding plugins etc.?

I also don't quite understand (not having tried it out yet, obviously) how you'll handle static files (images, etc.) uploaded via the Wordpress "media" feature. Is GAE able to support that?

Anyhow, congratulations on the launch. I'm not a huge fan of PHP myself but I frequently find myself having to use it (e.g. to host a Wordpress site!) so this is really an interesting avenue for me to explore.

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

#87

Post by krapp »

adambard wrote: post #84

I cannot possibly hope to express the reasons I dislike PHP better than this comprehensive article: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de... An excerpt: > 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. > You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’…

I'm starting to wonder whether there should be a version of Godwin's Law for Hacker News: As any thread mentioning PHP progresses, the probability of a poster mentioning "A Fractal Of Bad Design" approaches 1.

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

#88

Post by vidarh »

pestaa wrote: post #22
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…

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.

Engineering is not computer science.

A sane engineer don't pick technology based on what is most theoretically pure, but based on what can deliver on the requirements on time and on budget.

If you are building a simple CRUD style application, for example, there's likely nothing in your technical requirements that precludes PHP in any way. Then the question turns to ease of deployment and maintenance, operational costs, cost and availability of developer time, and there PHP tends to score quite well, not least because there's a huge pool of relatively skilled engineers that know it.

I personally prefer Ruby and don't like writing PHP at all, but I'd be a horrible engineer if I wrote it off in situations, where, e.g., it is hard to hire Ruby developers at a reasonable price, or there's a lot of existing PHP knowledge within a team that is already in place.

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

#89

Post by petersmagnusson »

salimmadjd wrote: post #62
snorkel wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, PHP is only used for amateur useless projects like Facebook, Wikipedia, Drupal, WordPress ... Our projects on the other hand are too important for this low brow language.

All the stuff you are talking about are valid examples, but they are from 5-10 years ago. None of these probably will be built on PHP again. I can use the same reasoning and list some major critical applications and argue for Cobol, Fortan, etc. But it doesn't mean it's forward thinking.

We get requests for PHP all the time. In Urs' presentation today, the audience response at I/O was the strongest for three things specifically - open signups for GCE, sub-hour GCE billing, and GAE support for PHP.

Slamming PHP is akin to slamming the x86 instruction set. It's besides the point. There are so many large "apps" that effectively use PHP as asm; we need to have a solution for customers that want to run open source CMS:es and CRM:s, for example, and this is all Wordpress, Drupal, SugarCRM, MediaWiki, Joomla etc.

And there are a LOT of startup companies building in PHP, believe it or not. PHP on the server is akin to Javascript on the client. You can argue that Erlang or Go is better, fine, but the reality is that most web sites are PHP. And similar to what happened with V8, there is a significant industry effort in just accepting this and making PHP run faster and better. We don't want you to compare GAE/PHP with GAE/language_X. You should compare GAE/PHP with [other platform]/PHP, and see if you like what we've done. And we're doing some cool stuff with it. We are working to support PHP code better than any alternative. We expect PHP developers to love it. But we're not doing it in order to advocate (or not advocate) PHP per se. You don't like PHP? Then move along, there's nothing to see here.

And as for the "small $5-6 dollar sites" (or free), that doesn't matter. Many of the apps running on GAE are within the free tier, which is one of the great things about the platform. So that's not news. Part of the GAE vision has always been to offer a place on the web to run small web apps for free.

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

#90

Post by eli »

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 $…

I would guess at least an order of magnitude more Enterprise web applications currently in use are written in PHP than Javascript and Ruby combined.
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