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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

#141

Post by tkw8 »

sneak wrote: post #64
PaulMest wrote: post #29

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…

In related news, Google also just dropped Drive pricing to exactly 50% that of Dropbox. Looks like they're trying to monetize all that huge capacity they have floating around. It's about time AWS had some serious competition.

In related news Amazon Cloud Drive still costs less per GB than Google Drive. AWS is also years ahead of GCE in terms of features and customer support and has been dropping prices regularly for years. GCE doesn't bring anything new that Rackspace, Azure, HP, Oracle etc. aren't already providing. GCE is likely to be as effective against AWS as Google+ was against Facebook...

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

#142

Post by enneff »

petersmagnusson wrote: post #98
salimmadjd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% try 500-1000%

The "they will hike prices 10x when it's popular" meme is pretty tiresome. I tried to address it back at the time, I invite you to read my thoughts again: https://plus.sandbox.google.com/110401818717224273095/posts/... and happy to debate again. But please read it first. GAE at the time was running as an experimental/beta product. There was no support, there was no SLA, and there was no deprecation policy. When a pro…

A working URL: https://plus.google.com/110401818717224273095/posts/AA3sBWG9...

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

#143

Post by pestaa »

iguana wrote: post #139
astrodust wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the question "I want to build a web application", PHP is not the answer. It is the worst in nearly every category you cite. Are there automated deployment tools written in PHP for PHP applications? I mean ones that can be taken seriously. What optimization options do you have for PHP? What latitude do you have with hosting? If you're not Facebook, writing your own PHP engine, you're going to be stuck with one of…

Software snobbery. "Cost and developer time are non-factors" Bro, do you even startup?

Don't quote and cut half of his sentence off. You tried to change the meaning substantially.

His point was that learning PHP properly with all the shenanigans takes at least as much as time as learning a well thought out environment.

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

#144

Post by pestaa »

krapp wrote: post #99
TheHydroImpulse wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. But the fact is PHP as a language is messy, albeit some frameworks have made it better (i.e Laravel). I'm assessing Wordpress because of it's praise by many people when it's not well built (have you looked at the codebase?). Just look at the author and history of PHP, the author hates computer science, and it was derived from Perl as a templating engine, not something I'd hold as quality. Nonetheless framework…

I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone praise Wordpress code if they've had to work with it, apart from actual contributors to the WP core of course. Wordpress is popular almost entirely because it's easy to deploy and has a vast ecosystem of plugins and themes which mostly just work. You could probably build a competing CMS in, say Laravel 4, replace the plugin system with Composer packages or something si…

Using WordPress is not as brainless as you point it out to be. All software needs to be learned, and from my experience let me tell you WordPress is not always learnt well.

WordPress is being pushed only because the majority of web developers can tinker with PHP only.

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

#145

Post by pestaa »

romaniv wrote: post #55
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…

PHP's popularity comes from the fact that it has good documentation, it's easy to deploy, there are lots of ready-to-use solutions written in it and its core API has many methods to solve common problems.

PHP's documentation is one of the worst I've found. Generally I have to hunt down edge cases and weird behaviors in the comments section.

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

#146

Post by Joeri »

astrodust wrote: post #128
vidarh wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cost…

For the question "I want to build a web application", PHP is not the answer. It is the worst in nearly every category you cite. Are there automated deployment tools written in PHP for PHP applications? I mean ones that can be taken seriously. What optimization options do you have for PHP? What latitude do you have with hosting? If you're not Facebook, writing your own PHP engine, you're going to be stuck with one of…

The framework benchmarks posted repeatedly here have shown PHP can hold its own performance-wise against ruby and python. PHP is not slow. PHP's per request model also makes it easy to build state-free front-end servers which you need in order to scale by throwing more hardware at the problem.

I agree that if you already know another platform there's no reason to switch to PHP, but similarly i've not seen much reason to switch away from PHP, aside from personal preference in language syntax.

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

#147

Post by Joeri »

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…

I write javascript and php code for a living, and i don't think they're in the same class. Javascript is a nice language with warts tacked on, php however is not a nice language no matter how much you squint.

For example, javascript at its core has a string type that is treated like an array of characters in proper unicode, with a sane extensible method-based string api. PHP at its core by contrast only knows byte arrays and its string handling (global!) functions are basically useless for dealing with unicode (there's mbstring and intl, but too many people don't use those).

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

#148

Post by michaelt »

Roedou wrote: post #56
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…

It's an incredibly quick way of getting something out there. If agility matters, I've not found anything that beats it. You might not want your service running on there as you scale, but it's enough to get a few thousand users onboarded as a proof of concept.

Some parts of app engine are very much designed to be really scalable and geographically redundant. Take sharded counters, for example [1], if you want to count something that happens more than 5 times a second.

If you want a proof of concept and you're not concerned about getting the scalability, why not run on a single server?

[1] https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/sharding_co...

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

#149

Post by coldtea »

TheHydroImpulse wrote: post #28
umsm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

>Wordpress is garbage. Just because there are a lot of production sites built or using Wordpress doesn't mean it's good.

No, it does mean it's good. You're comparing opinion (everybody has one) with actual hard real world results (tons of major sites with million hits running on Wordpress and around 15% of the web too).

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

#150

Post by regularfry »

Joeri wrote: post #146
astrodust wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the question "I want to build a web application", PHP is not the answer. It is the worst in nearly every category you cite. Are there automated deployment tools written in PHP for PHP applications? I mean ones that can be taken seriously. What optimization options do you have for PHP? What latitude do you have with hosting? If you're not Facebook, writing your own PHP engine, you're going to be stuck with one of…

The framework benchmarks posted repeatedly here have shown PHP can hold its own performance-wise against ruby and python. PHP is not slow. PHP's per request model also makes it easy to build state-free front-end servers which you need in order to scale by throwing more hardware at the problem. I agree that if you already know another platform there's no reason to switch to PHP, but similarly i've not seen much reason…

> PHP is not slow.

Contentious. The VM itself is, but there are many functions implemented in C. Whether it'll be fast or slow for your application is not necessarily immediately obvious.

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