> Also what people request and what google's vision is are two different things.
Google's vision is "developers deploying scalable apps on App Engine". Being developer-friendly is good for that.
> Who are they targeting with this PHP stuff.
Existing PHP devs. Which is a lot of devs.
> Yes sure, for free-tier stuff, I'm sure lots of kids playing around with PHP would love to have a sand-box to play around.
Lots of apps that end up making money use PHP.
> But this move seems inconsistent with their prior action that signaled a move toward enterprise sales.
Enterprise is an area that Google would like to get their Cloud Platform, including App Engine, more sales in, but its never been anywhere close to their sole target for it.
> They're building a whole application scripting system hosted on google Drive to work with google apps, etc.
"Building"? Apps Script has been around a long time (longer than Drive itself; maybe longer than App Engine.)
> Why not provide the javascript on GAE to allow further application development and integration.
Javascript on GAE would make a lot of sense, too (especially in light of App Script and Google's work on V8 and the emerging popularity of Node.) So would Dart-on-GAE. I wouldn't be surprised if either (or both) of those happened. But the fact that it makes sense doesn't make PHP make any less sense.
> To be honest, this feels like: Oh shit! Google I/O is coming up and we need to have something to show
App Engine PHP wasn't even the big Cloud Platform announcement tied to I/O; general availability of the Compute Engine IaaS (and the associated new pricing and instance types for Clound Engine) was the big Cloud Platform news.
> than a vision of providing cloud-based computing solution that fits within their big vision.
Google's big vision for cloud-based computing is, well, big. It includes more than one kind of solution, for more than one market segment.
Google's vision is "developers deploying scalable apps on App Engine". Being developer-friendly is good for that.
> Who are they targeting with this PHP stuff.
Existing PHP devs. Which is a lot of devs.
> Yes sure, for free-tier stuff, I'm sure lots of kids playing around with PHP would love to have a sand-box to play around.
Lots of apps that end up making money use PHP.
> But this move seems inconsistent with their prior action that signaled a move toward enterprise sales.
Enterprise is an area that Google would like to get their Cloud Platform, including App Engine, more sales in, but its never been anywhere close to their sole target for it.
> They're building a whole application scripting system hosted on google Drive to work with google apps, etc.
"Building"? Apps Script has been around a long time (longer than Drive itself; maybe longer than App Engine.)
> Why not provide the javascript on GAE to allow further application development and integration.
Javascript on GAE would make a lot of sense, too (especially in light of App Script and Google's work on V8 and the emerging popularity of Node.) So would Dart-on-GAE. I wouldn't be surprised if either (or both) of those happened. But the fact that it makes sense doesn't make PHP make any less sense.
> To be honest, this feels like: Oh shit! Google I/O is coming up and we need to have something to show
App Engine PHP wasn't even the big Cloud Platform announcement tied to I/O; general availability of the Compute Engine IaaS (and the associated new pricing and instance types for Clound Engine) was the big Cloud Platform news.
> than a vision of providing cloud-based computing solution that fits within their big vision.
Google's big vision for cloud-based computing is, well, big. It includes more than one kind of solution, for more than one market segment.