

Why Google App Engine Shouldn't Include PHP - mikeyur
http://blog.jeffhui.net/2009/04/why-google-app-engine-shouldnt-include-php/

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gord
He seems to be saying "PHP shouldn't be supported because its a bit of an ugly
language and somewhat insecure"

But then should they only support Scheme? :]

The problem is theres so much useful {badly written} PHP code out there, its
going to be hard to ignore.

I guess they'll _have_ to adopt PHP, Python, Ruby/Rails in order to get user
volume.

Which language is better is probably irrelevant.

~~~
jlees
Well, the OP seems to point at PHP developers generally being poorly educated
and clueless, mostly deploying other people's apps rather than writing their
own. In short, they won't have a clue how to use GAE if it provides BigTable
rather than MySQL so out-of-the-box LAMP apps fail to work without a rewrite.

Does GAE really want user volume if those are the sorts of users they'll get?

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RossM
While the comment that many PHP applications depend on a MySQL database (I'd
seriously expect WP to have some sort of DAL by now) is true it wouldn't be
impossible for someone to write an extension to support Google's BigTable _.

Article was a little confusing(ly structured) but surprised me by not
completely bashing PHP.

_ I haven't actually used GAE and assume BigTable is another database
platform.

~~~
anamax
> I haven't actually used GAE and assume BigTable is another database
> platform.

Background: GAE doesn't provide access to BigTable. It provides access to GAE
Datastore which is built on top of BigTable. Both are key-value stores. I
don't know how much indexing that bigtable provides, but datastore has a fair
amount (under user control).

There are no joins or aggregations in the GAE query API and queries can only
return one type of object. (The provided subclass/roll-up model seems a little
odd.) These constraints seem baked-in.

The transaction model is basically "all objects under a given root name can be
updated/created/deleted as an atomic operation." (Within said atomic
operation, a given object can only be written once and I forget whether reads
see writes.) This makes it hard to do certain sorts of real-world
transactions. (Imagine transferring money between two accounts.)

The datastore also has certain size and "number of object" limits. Then again,
the platform limits the amount of time that each operation is allowed to take.

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ZeroGravitas
It may already be too late, PHP on the JVM:

<http://www.caucho.com/resin-3.0/quercus/>

Note, I know nothing about the project, just first result from Google. I knew
something existed because I'd read about IBM's Project Zero, but I think their
implementation of PHP on the JVM (called P8, iirc) is closed source.

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ssharp
Has blatant PHP bashing been made so taboo around here that we must now endure
passive-aggressive PHP bashing?

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robotron
Wow, this is a horrible article. Where does the author get his facts about the
quality level of "most" PHP developers? Sounds like typical religious flaming
and half-arsed fud.

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gonick_daysbury
The argument being made is unclear. Is the author saying that Google App
Engine should not support PHP because PHP is not a robust language? If so,
that's not a very persuasive argument.

More importantly, this is a very poor piece of writing, the worst I've seen in
some time. For starters, the author would do well to learn how to write a
thesis statement:

<http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/thesis.html>

