

Google App Engine finally supports PHP - SmeelBe
http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/17/google-app-engine-finally-supports-php-the-language-that-runs-75-of-the-web/
Two days ago, Google announced it would finally support the most popular computing language on the planet, PHP, in its platform-as-a-service offering, Google App Engine.
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RyanZAG
I don't see this getting that much traction. Most existing PHP code is heavily
dedicated to the use of SQL, and if you don't use the key-value datastore you
give up a lot of the scaling advantages of appengine.

Secondly, PHP devs and sites are used to very affordable hosting options, and
GAE is horribly overpriced for the computing power you get.

Thirdly, Google doesn't really seem to care about customers of their AppEngine
platform. App Engine Java routinely routes clients to new VMs that are not
finished starting up, giving clients 5-15 sec delays on page loads. Google's
response to this was to give a lecture at I/O 2013 on how to hard code
configurations into your java code [1]. Basically, if you thought Heroku did a
poor job of load balancing, Google App Engine takes the cake for terrible load
balancing.

I really don't know who Google is trying to target with GAE - they seem to be
trying to cater to bloggers, small startups, and enterprise all at once. This
pretty much just gives everyone the worst of all worlds with bloggers getting
a system that is very complex, small startups getting excessive costs as soon
as any processing is involved, and enterprise getting a system that will
likely fall out from under them in 5-10 years time.

[1]
[https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!topic...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!topic/google-
appengine/Nz4Yt8V6PB0)

~~~
amish
tl;dr flamers > "PHP Sucks!" php developers > no. really. trust us. it
doesn't.

~~~
krapp
well, it doesn't _entirely_ suck...

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flixic
They seem to twist the facts ever so slightly.

PHP is not "most popular computing language on the planet", it's the most
popular web coding language; C is the most popular "computing" language,
whatever that means.

And in linked article they make it seem that PhoneGap apps are more native
than they are, "built-in PhoneGap integration so developers can publish native
app packages to the various app stores".

Not factually wrong, but not very clear truth either.

~~~
gngeal
I'd say that Java is the most popular one, but C does all the hard work!

~~~
voidlogic
When people say C is the most popular, this is the metric they are often
referring too:
[http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....](http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html)

~~~
gngeal
Yeah, I know TIOBE - when I said "popular", I mostly meant "what most
companies make the most fuss about". (As in "we must move out ERP system to
Java! Quick!" :-)) C kind of seems to evade this kind of popularity nowadays,
it seems to be forgotten by many, almost like a second level of machine code.

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aviraldg
In the words of Koushik Dutta (aka Koush): "With Google App Engine now
supporting PHP, we can all host our Wordpress vulnerabilities at Google
scale."

------
Kiro
I am no hardcore programmer and PHP is perfect for me. Tbh I haven't
encountered one single bad thing about it during my 5 years programming,
although I understand there are major flaws in it. What I'm saying is that for
most people PHP works completely fine and is as good as anything.

~~~
danbruc
Of course, you can build working stuff with PHP. It is good enough for weekend
projects and prototyping stuff. Companies like Facebook have even proved that
you can build huge things with it.

Put that's not the point. It's not about bashing PHP for the sake of it. A
large number of software projects is behind schedule and over budget. Why?
Because developing software is hard and humans are bad at estimating effort.

Now why should we make the situation even worse by using tools that are not as
good as possible while we are completely aware of the flaws (and good things)
in our current tools?

Pointing out PHP's flaws over and over again while seeing that its usage does
not drop tells us something - there seems to be no (obvious) better
alternative. »PHP sucks!« is crying for help. Someone please build an
obviously better alternative. Ideally as compatible as possible to make
porting from PHP not practically infeasible.

~~~
pornel
Most PHP flaws that people moan about are _shallow_. Inconsistent naming of
functions and parameter order, syntax warts — those are annoying, but
ultimately don't matter.

What matters is that PHP has got big things right. Deployment is trivial. One
process per request happens to mitigate leaks and (over)shared state. Failures
affect one client at most, and scalability bottleneck is pushed down to the
database.

------
markdown
I like this just for the fact that it means GAE is here to stay.

They're going hard on App Engine, and I'll take that as a win even for python-
heads like me.

~~~
obviouslygreen
I definitely wouldn't take this for granted. All it means is that, right now,
there are internal resources dedicated to improving the platform's language
support. Those that make this largely unsupported assumption will be the most
irate and in the worst position if Google drops the platform at some point
(not to mention this platform is horrible in terms of proprietary lock in).

~~~
markdown
> if Google drops the platform at some point

That's a little too far-fetched for me. GAE isn't in the same category as end-
user services like Reader or any of the other apps they've dropped.

I don't expect them to run it forever, but I trust them enough to believe that
if they ever decide to pull the plug, they'll give us a fair bit of warning
(half a decade?).

They're not stupid, and they're not suicidal.

------
ppradhan
ah... good old HN snobs tripping over each other in the comments section to
give old PHP a much needed lashing.

~~~
PommeDeTerre
There's nothing "snobbish" about pointing out serious technological flaws in a
given programming language or application. This is especially true when those
flaws have no justifiable reason for existing in the first place, or when they
can compromise the security of data and other systems.

~~~
shocks
Right, but it doesn't need to be pointed out by 100 people every single time
the language comes up in conversation. PHP has its place. HNs typical "PHP LOL
OMFG WTF SHIT" reaction is childish.

~~~
PommeDeTerre
Such flaws should be pointed out whenever possible by however many people feel
like pointing them out.

I think that the skilled members of any community or industry have a duty to
stand against technology that is inherently broken. This is quite distant from
being "childish". In fact, it's a sign of maturity when one can unemotionally
analyze a given tool and deem it to be of an insufficient quality for
practical use.

And the "typical reaction" is absolutely nothing like you suggest. Time and
time again I see well-reasoned, objective analysis which clearly points out
the numerous negative facts about PHP. The problem does not lie with those who
express these facts, but rather with those who, for whatever reason, cannot or
will not accept them.

~~~
dageshi
It isn't inherently broken, if it were inherently broken nobody would be using
it, which is quite obviously not the case.

From my point of view, ruby, python all the rest are inherently broken because
nobody makes any damned products from them which aren't used by other
programmers or sold as a service.

You don't need to be a programmer to use Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, phpBB and
the endless list of customer facing, customer usable PHP apps. You don't need
to be a programmer to configure their environments and get them running. You
don't need to be a programmer to extend them, you just need to find the right
plugin/module to suit your needs.

I cannot think of any other web based language that even comes close in this
regard. Why is that? If these languages are so good, why is no one making any
software with them that ordinary people and not programmers can actually use?

~~~
dragonwriter
> From my point of view, ruby, python all the rest are inherently broken
> because nobody makes any damned products from them which aren't used by
> other programmers or sold as a service.

Even assuming that this is true (which its not, but we'll get to that later
on) How does this matter? And, particularly, how is "sold as a service" an
issue?

> You don't need to be a programmer to use Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, phpBB
> and the endless list of customer facing, customer usable PHP apps. ou don't
> need to be a programmer to configure their environments and get them
> running. You don't need to be a programmer to extend them, you just need to
> find the right plugin/module to suit your needs.

How is this different from Plone or any of the other CMS, blogging, and
discussion platforms built in Python, Ruby, and other non-PHP languages, that
likewise are designed to be installed and configured by non-programmers and
which are extensible via plugin/module systems?

> I cannot think of any other web based language that even comes close in this
> regard.

What is a "web based language"? But I suspect the reason you can't think of
any other language has nothing to do with what is actually true of other
languages, and more about you.

> If these languages are so good, why is no one making any software with them
> that ordinary people and not programmers can actually use?

Software that is successfully sold as a service to ordinary people is software
that ordinary people and not programmers can actually use. Otherwise, it
wouldn't make any sales.

As are a lot of other things you seem unaware of built with non-PHP languages.

~~~
shocks
You comment is very condescending. You should not be trying to infer from the
parent comment that dageshi is some kind of naive newby programmer who doesn't
understand.

dageshi made some valid comments about the role PHP fills and you dismissed
them and instead focused on calling him/her out for being a bad/poor
programmer.

~~~
danbruc
Besides the language of the comment all his points are valid.

 _It isn't inherently broken, if it were inherently broken nobody would be
using it, which is quite obviously not the case._

The language is broken. JavaScript, too. Both are used because there are no
alternatives. There are obviously alternatives for PHP but these seem to fall
so far behind in ease of use that they don't gain enough traction. Therefore I
argue we need a new language - easy to use as PHP but without all the flaws of
it.

 _From my point of view, ruby, python all the rest are inherently broken
because nobody makes any damned products from them which aren't used by other
programmers or sold as a service._

I am no web developer and my knowledge of commonly used web frameworks and who
uses what is really limited but it seems reasonable to assume this statement
is wrong.

I did a quick search and the first hit was Django build on top of Python used
by Instagram and Pinterest. [1] There may be more PHP based apps out there
because it is so easy to use but it is definitely not true that no one uses
alternatives.

 _You don't need to be a programmer to use Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, phpBB
and the endless list of customer facing, customer usable PHP apps. You don't
need to be a programmer to configure their environments and get them running.
You don't need to be a programmer to extend them, you just need to find the
right plugin/module to suit your needs._

When you use a product that only requires setup, configuration and throwing in
some plug-ins it does not matter at all which language has been used to build
that product. This statement is completely irrelevant to this discussion.

 _I cannot think of any other web based language that even comes close in this
regard. Why is that? If these languages are so good, why is no one making any
software with them that ordinary people and not programmers can actually use?_

Again, my personal guess is that the ease of (ab)use of PHP outweighs - or at
least seems to do so - the advantages of »better« languages.

[1] [http://www.fiveq.com/blog/programming/building-django-
good-c...](http://www.fiveq.com/blog/programming/building-django-good-
company/)

------
jrockway
_Google App Engine was almost a science project for the first few years, only
supporting languages that Google used internally._

Python?

~~~
sambe
Google uses a lot of Python, I thought. They started unladen-swallow.

~~~
jrockway
My point is that Python is not some crazy language only used by Google. It's
Python.

------
kami8845
Isn't GAE like ... long dead? Who would still trust them with a new project at
this point in time?

------
danbruc
More potential for one of the worst languages to spread - let's have one
minute of silence. And after that someone please start building an alternative
keeping the good parts that made PHP successful and getting rid of the insane
stuff.

~~~
Joeri
But, what if it were the insane parts that made PHP successful? PHP is
basically a shell script hooked up to a web server, with '$_REQUEST' flowing
in one way, and 'echo' flowing out the other way. Its over-simplified
architecture is exactly why beginners like it so much.

~~~
wmil
The simple architecture is actually what PHP got right. For comparison, if you
were using mod_python with the default settings, you needed to restart apache
whenever you changed a file.

The insane part of PHP is the actual language. It's an overgrown template
language. Half the functions are based on C, half the functions are based on
Perl. There's no regularity or consistency.

~~~
gngeal
_Half the functions are based on C, half the functions are based on Perl.
There's no regularity or consistency._

Recently, a third half of it was based on Java. :-)

------
6ren

      char* a = "PHP";
      while (*a) putchar(*a+++7);

------
joeblau
This move doesn't make much sense to me. Most of the websites built in PHP are
huge CMS services like Weebly, Wordpress, Joomla, or old social networks like
Facebook. I don't see any of these large services switching over to get hosted
on Google. Plus PHP in general is disorganized and slow compared to more
contemporary languages with well defined frameworks.

~~~
mscarborough
In addition to those hosted services, is all of the self-hosted Wordpress,
Joomla, Zencart, etc. Plus all of the business and personal sites built on
Zend, Symfony, Cake.

~~~
duskwuff
And most of those Wordpress/etc installs are going to be of applications which
assume they're in a normal hosting environment, where they're running on
Apache with a filesystem they can write to, connecting to a MySQL server, etc.
How well will this translate to GAE? I'm not sure.

------
daw___
I am not excited for the PHP support per se, but for its side effects: I think
now it's time for cheap hostings around the world to roll up the sleeves and
finally start offering something new.

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Nux
Surprised it took them this long! Ignoring the most popular language for
webdev must have left many scratching their heads.

