Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP

googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 161 posts

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

#51

Post by snorkel »

salimmadjd wrote: post #25
cramsdale wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#54

Post by fletchowns »

pjscott wrote: post #38
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?

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 using App Engine for at this point would be a school project or something.

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

#55

Post by romaniv »

tekacs wrote: post #10
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...

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.

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

#56

Post by Roedou »

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…

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.

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

#57

Post by TheHydroImpulse »

umsm wrote: post #45
TheHydroImpulse wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Most of the arguments are biased opinions and can't really be defended. But... if you don't like wordpress, why not assess projects such as Symfony2 or Drupal?

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 frameworks have made it better but I still feel the platform is broken and often attributed with newcomers to web development.

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

#58

Post by regularfry »

salimmadjd wrote: post #14
arunabha wrote: post #3

Google Compute Engine - now available for everyone * * 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'.

100% try 500-1000%

It's realistically priced right now, and it's an underdog in the market, positioned as a commodity. Raising prices would kill it stone dead.

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

#59

Post by salimmadjd »

cramsdale wrote: post #41
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…

I'm assuming that you're actually talking about Node and not just HTML + JS. Ultimately it wasn't a choice to do one and not the other, it was a choice of which to tackle first (and PHP had some technical advantages which allowed us to move faster). Ultimately we want to surface, or allow others to surface, any runtime in a fully managed way. Yes, Node, Ruby, C# are often discussed (as are many others, including movi…

I don't necessarily mean Node, but serverside javascript. I don't really care for the event notification process of Node. It has its place and for many tasks it probably is the best solution. However for most web apps its probably simpler not to worry about it.

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

#60

Post by TheHydroImpulse »

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…

JavaScript has a mixed praise. Some people hate it but still use it because it's the only option, while other people love it to death.

I think once people know how to use JavaScript appropriately and uses it's strengths then it's a much better language. Back in the day I found JavaScript weird and messy but that was partly how I used it. The prototype pattern is extremely powerful and JavaScript is a multi-paradigm language, which is great. OOP or Functional, it's your choice.

With the rise of really good front-end frameworks (they're getting better), the quality of JavaScript applications is getting better and better and Node.js has also done a really good job at boosting JavaScripts rep.

I do think the standards body is greatly flawed and all the different browser implementations are increasingly frustrating. The ability to use new features is extremely little, unless you use JavaScript as an embedded language in another application (i.e HTML5 App in a native context).

I don't think JavaScript will be the next PHP.

Post reply on HN