10 ms·
Google Compute Engine available for everyone, App Engine adds PHP
- melvinmt 13y agoDoes anyone know when Go 1.1 is available on App Engine?
- dsymonds 13y agoIt'll arrive in the next release or two.
- yogo 13y agoLOL 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=13&colspec=ID%20Type%20Component%20Status%20Stars%20Summary%20Language%20Priority%20Owner%20Log https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=1...
- astrodust 13y agoPHP is only popular because many hosting providers support it. Many hosting providers only support it because it's popular. At no point in this equation does the relative merits of the language itself factor in.
- yogo 13y agoYet they didn't support it for years and now they are. I only found it funny because within the HN ecosystem you get the impression that it's really dying (rightfully so given the better options out there). Now another platform provider is supporting it, which will only increase its popularity according to your statements.
- cramsdale 13y agoFor many applications they require a CMS and PHP clearly owns the market space here with Wordpress and Drupal -- strategic in terms of driving growth and new business. We also believe that since App Engine was built with multitenancy in mind from day one that it's a more secure, hardened environment -- better for developers. Finally, and to my point above, the majority of the internet has been built with PHP whether folks like it or not. We want to bring the benefits of cloud to this large corpus of developers -- advancing computing rather than stagnating it.
- iguana 13y agoPHP is popular because it's incredibly easy to get started for someone used to doing things with HTML. An HTML page can be renamed to .php, and that is a valid PHP page. For someone trying to go from HTML/CSS to the server side, PHP presents the path of least resistance. When using PHP, a lot of the basic data structure transforms are implemented in the core language. You can integrate simple server side functionality into a static HTML page in just a few minutes, and it will work on 99%+ of hosting providers, and requires no fees and no tools. 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. Also, WordPress, while the biggest POS in almost every possible way, has a vast community of users, designers, plugin makers, and a marketplace for various extensions and themes. Google just opened up a huge chunk of the web app / CMS market.
- umsm 13y ago> 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.
- TheHydroImpulse 13y agoWordpress 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).
- camus 13y agoPHP is popular because users know it is a good compromise between javaish stuffs ( type hinting in functions and methods , private,protected,public members, interfaces,and abstract classes ) and some whatever dynamic stuff out there ( dynamic , weak typing ) and some weird/functional stuffs ( pointers , closures , callbacks ). Yes PHP has a lot of bad parts. But its good parts are really really good. Most hosting providers dont allow serious php development anyway , so it makes little difference. You need a vps or a PAAS to do serious PHP development , like any other solution out there. I love python and ruby. But I really miss type hinting everytime i use one of these.
- TheHydroImpulse 13y agoPHP has just mixed and matched a ton of different features from other languages without having consistency. For example, many of the core functions have different naming conventions and many of it's OOP features are after thoughts.
- chromatic 13y agoAt no point in this equation does the relative merits of the language itself factor in. ... except for "easy to deploy", which is a merit.
- iguana 13y ago* Easy to deploy * Cheap to deploy * Easy to find programmers to help you * Affordable programmers * Code is easy to read for non-programmers who understand HTML * Ton of free code available to reuse Inconsistency, poorly thought out OO, lack of purity, and disdain by hipsters are a small price to pay for those merits.
- krapp 13y ago... disdain by hipsters is a bonus in my book.
- astrodust 13y agoSo you're a hipster, basically. "Hating PHP? That's so mainstream. Personally, I'm hating on Haskell and NodeJS."
- krapp 13y agoI plan to hate Python once I learn enough of it.
- brokenparser 13y agoSignificant whitespace.
- eevee 13y agoSo you're saying that, as a programmer, it's in my best interests to learn something other than PHP so I'll be less affordable...?
- 13y ago
- tekacs 13y agoPopularity, 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 sibling commenter managed to put it better than me (and less controversially).
- JoeKM 13y agoI 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 are no other options. If there were, I think JavaScript would easily be the next PHP (and for good reason).
- TheHydroImpulse 13y agoJavaScript 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.
- mikeash 13y agoThere's awful, and then there's PHP. JavaScript isn't a great language, but it's OK. Maybe "awful", but lots of languages are. PHP, on the other hand, is in a class of its own, far worse than JavaScript or any other mainstream language I've experienced.
- MatthewPhillips 13y agoGoogle IO 2014: App Engine now supports ColdFusion.
- yogo 13y agoI don't see it :). ColdFusion is both hated and relatively unpopular, PHP has popularity going for it.
- jasonhanley 13y agoPHP is a solid workhorse. Quick to prototype, and once a PHP app is up and running, it just works. Wikipedia, Facebook, MailChimp, WordPress, tons more -- they all load fast and are hardly ever down. You can argue all day about the fine details of programming languages, but PHP is popular for good reasons.
- TheHydroImpulse 13y agoYou attribute high availability to the infrastructure entirely, not just a front facing programming language. Facebook has a massive architecture and only it's front-end stuff (views, data retrieval) are done in PHP. Everything else are separate services written in Java (or some other JVM language) and communicate through Thrift. PHP isn't accredited with Facebook's high availability and Facebook doesn't even serve PHP, it serves compile C++ code that was compiled from PHP.
- arunabha 13y agoGoogle 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'.
- krasin 13y agoGCE does not impose any vendor lock-in. It's just VMs on demand, so it would be easy to migrate to Amazon EC2, Rackspace, etc at any point.
- salimmadjd 13y ago100% try 500-1000%
- regularfry 13y agoIt's realistically priced right now, and it's an underdog in the market, positioned as a commodity. Raising prices would kill it stone dead.
- petersmagnusson 13y agoThe "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/AA3sBWG92gu 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 product is experimental or beta, eventually the time comes around when we need to look at next steps. We concluded that the pricing was insanely low at the time and did not make for a viable long-term product. And when we talked to customers, they absolutely didn't want us to discontinue the product, but instead they wanted us to invest in it and provide support. So that's what we decided to do. In working with customers, we determined that (after reasonable optimizations), the vast majority of apps would experience 2-5x increase in bills. Obviously we lost some customers because of this, but much fewer than you think, and mostly (but not always) because they were simply architected in ways that badly matched GAE, or had business models that assumed a cost-of-operations that was unrealistic (either on GAE or anywhere else), and that we had in effect been subsidizing. GAE targets being the "best" option, including cost - but you need to include the entire cost, and factor in ease of use, SRE operations, durability, scalability, etc. We're happy to duke it out with any apples-to-apples comparison for total cost of ownership.
- manacit 13y agoIt looks like they have preemptively documented how to install Wordpress: https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/wordpress https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/wordpress I wonder how the performance is -- will they support common cache plugins? If not, I wonder if stock wordpress on GAE will be able to withstand getting frontpage'd on HN/Reddit Edit: Unfortunately, as there is no CloudSQL free tier, there's no way to test it out without paying a small amount.
- ajessup 13y agoAJ here, a PM on App Engine (and the guy who wrote the tutorial). The Batcache plugin (which caches to Memcache) works on GAE out of the box, and gives a predictable improvement to performance, especially when you've got a lot of DB-heavy plugins.
- dchest 13y agoAs Cloud SQL will provide it's own security features its
- ajessup 13y agoThanks, will fix :)
- jsdalton 13y agoThat's a nice tutorial and the idea of running Wordpress on GAE is intriguing to say the least. I apologize that I have not closely familiarized myself with Google Cloud SQL. Is it really API compatible with MySQL, or are there limitation that one is bound to run into when one starts adding plugins etc.? I also don't quite understand (not having tried it out yet, obviously) how you'll handle static files (images, etc.) uploaded via the Wordpress "media" feature. Is GAE able to support that? Anyhow, congratulations on the launch. I'm not a huge fan of PHP myself but I frequently find myself having to use it (e.g. to host a Wordpress site!) so this is really an interesting avenue for me to explore.
- 13y ago
- i_am_good 13y agoI can't seem to find the registration form, how does one get started?
- zafirk 13y agoI'm Zafir, I work on the Cloud Platform team. Compute Engine will be available tonight, so please check back in a few hours.
- i_am_good 13y agoAwesome, thanks!
- rtanaka 13y agoI just signed up here: https://gaeforphp.appspot.com/ https://gaeforphp.appspot.com/
- zafirk 13y agoWhoops, I thought the question was about Compute Engine. Yes, you can sign up for PHP on App Engine at the link you provided.
- papsosouid 13y agoI know there's google people floating around HN, does anyone know what the priorities are like as far as adding more services is concerned? I've been planning on launching on AWS, but I'd prefer google. But there's still tons of services google doesn't offer (or I can't find reference to at least). It is basically just alternatives to EC2, S3 and the database thing right now right? Are there plans for replacements for SQS, SNS, SES, route53, cloudwatch, etc?
- namityadav 13y agoWhen it comes to my (virtual) infrastructure, I want to go with a platform that's stable (including in terms of price), well-tested by others who have similar needs as me, and has a lot of documentation / articles / questions online. And I would never go with a platform that doesn't have all other services that I may need (as you mentioned). Why wait for google replacing SES when you can just go with AWS? MHO, obviously!
- papsosouid 13y agoGoogle's offering is significantly faster, and is marginally cheaper is it not? I've had relatively poor experiences with the quality of documentation/articles/questions for AWS, I still haven't managed to get a simple s3 setup working to allow people to upload files through their browser for example. I'm not waiting for google, we're not ready to launch yet. I am just wondering if google will have some of the extra services by the time we are ready.
- tkw8 13y agoGCE seems like another "me too" product. The PaaS thing didn't work out so well for Google or Microsoft. When they realised AWS was much more popular with IaaS they simply set about copying AWS. They are years behind AWS and by the time they catch up with what AWS has today the world would have moved on to bigger and better features. So many new "me too" clouds, Azure, Rackspace, HP, even Oracle, and now Google.
- xaritas 13y agoI'm looking at GAE as a AWS alternative too, so what follows is not complete, just a few observations. Here is the run down on the runtime services available in the Java SDK (I think that it and Python are the most complete, not everything is available for Go last I checked): https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/apis https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/java/apis This is a good supplement: https://developers.google.com/appengine/tools_tips https://developers.google.com/appengine/tools_tips So queues and email are in, messaging might be served by Google Cloud Messaging or the recently announced Trello partnership. I don't think anything quite like CloudWatch or Route53 is available. I think of GAE as more like Heroku + add-ons than a straight AWS competitor so I wouldn't expect them to be entirely equivalent. On the other hand more control over the runtime lets them offer things that are entirely out of scope for AWS (channels). As far as updates, the blog shows the the SDK gets new features fairly frequently: http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/ http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/
- salimmadjd 13y agoPHP??? I would have thought javascript or Ruby would have made more sense.It seems like Google is just reacting to requests from 4 years ago. The App Engine has mades some decisions that seem to be contradictory. At one end, they drastically increased their prices and sent a signal the GAE was an enterprise-focused platform. Now, they're releasing PHP so people can host blogs on it. Really? You want to compete with $5-6/month wordpress hosting solutions. Who is running the show there?
- bradleyjg 13y agoIt was the single most requested feature on the bug tracker by quite a bit. It's not something I want, but apparently there are quite a few people who do.
- salimmadjd 13y agoIs this cumulative requests from the past 5 years? Also what people request and what google's vision is are two different things. Who are they targeting with this PHP stuff. 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. But this move seems inconsistent with their prior action that signaled a move toward enterprise sales. Also, it feels like one side of google is not talking with the other side. They're building a whole application scripting system hosted on google Drive to work with google apps, etc. Why not provide the javascript on GAE to allow further application development and integration. To be honest, this feels like: Oh shit! Google I/O is coming up and we need to have something to show than a vision of providing cloud-based computing solution that fits within their big vision.
- cramsdale 13y agoGoogle Drive / apps script integration is a great idea. Unifying our storage offerings across the entire company is a great idea too (but an aside for this conversation). I disagree with the "get something out" mentality, though. Shipping a fully managed runtime that scales as well as Java, Python, and Go, that is hardened, and is secure enough that we'll run it next to Gmail, Search, Geo, etc. is no easy task. It's not something you decide to do on a whim a few weeks before i/o.
- PaulMest 13y agoI 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 because it would require developers to write new apps or rewrite their existing apps from the ground up very specific to how Azure wants you to write it. This takes a lot of effort from a very specialized skillset, thus very expensive. Also, since you're writing it for the Azure platform, should you decide to switch to another provider, you'd have to rewrite your app again! What if you had a bad experience with customer support or billing? You'd basically be stuck. So Azure has since started offering Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) options, which has far lower switching costs. This has had much greater traction and builds an ongoing relationship with customers. The customers become more familiar with the Azure platform and support offerings. If they feel good about their IaaS experience, they will consider learning some of the premium features and leverage them when they update their existing apps. I think adding PHP is a strategically smart move by Google to get more people using their cloud platform. Soon there will be new billing relationships signed off by thousands of businesses to host basic apps and WordPress installations. Assuming customers have positive initial experiences with Google's PHP hosting, it will become easier for Google to upsell those businesses to add premium cloud features for more advanced applications over the coming years.
- sneak 13y agoIn 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.
- staunch 13y agoAnd now we know why Guido left to join Dropbox ;-)
- crncosta 13y agoLoL++
- fletchowns 13y agoGiven 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?
- pjscott 13y agoIf you have an application that happens to fit nicely into the App Engine Way, it's a pretty slick environment for deployment.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- fletchowns 13y agoYes, 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.
- Roedou 13y agoIt'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.
- michaelt 13y agoSome 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_counters https://developers.google.com/appengine/articles/sharding_co...
- tmzt 13y agoI recently left a job that was focused on developing PHP with a very different philosophy from how I would approach it. I see PHP as a growing and evolving object-oriented programming language. I see it as a language to which design patterns can be applied, for which structured designs can be applied, and which has improved which each major release. I also am keenly aware that it has a legacy and a reputation of being something else, a rapid prototyping environment for programmers that don't have exposure to other systems, and take it as a glorified template language for HTML. But I don't see it that way, I look at projects like http://reactphp.org/ http://reactphp.org/ which brings Node.js-style evented programming, native support for ZMQ and websocket, and makes PHP a great language for developing web workers. (Though with some caveats, for instance, I use PHP for my own application because it's dependent on the cpanel xmlapi which is provided in PHP). But that really is my point, you can abstract PHP from it's humble web roots and be a productive programmer in it.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- adambard 13y agoI cannot possibly hope to express the reasons I dislike PHP better than this comprehensive article: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de... An excerpt: > I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there. > You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in handy sometimes. > You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw part on both sides. Still serviceable though, I mean, you can hit nails with the middle of the head holding it sideways. > You pull out the pliers, but they don’t have those serrated surfaces; it’s flat and smooth. That’s less useful, but it still turns bolts well enough, so whatever. > And on you go. Everything in the box is kind of weird and quirky, but maybe not enough to make it completely worthless. And there’s no clear problem with the set as a whole; it still has all the tools. > Now imagine you meet millions of carpenters using this toolbox who tell you “well hey what’s the problem with these tools? They’re all I’ve ever used and they work fine!” And the carpenters show you the houses they’ve built, where every room is a pentagon and the roof is upside-down. And you knock on the front door and it just collapses inwards and they all yell at you for breaking their door. > That’s what’s wrong with PHP.
- Osiris 13y agoReally? I've heard all these ridiculous analogies but for some reason no one's every written up actual PHP examples to explain why this is true (Most of the examples in that link are weird things I've never seen anyone actually do). I've spent the last 8 months writing a fairly complex application as a REST API entirely in PHP and I can't say that I've ever run into any weird scenarios where I think to myself, "Damn, this is sure it like have a hammer but with claws on both sides." My code is very OOP relying heavily on my own classes and not quite as much on the built-in PHP functions. I have also found that when I need to do something odd that there's usually a pre-built function already in PHP for doing it. So if you're going to bash PHP at least throw out some actual PHP code and explain why it's bad (and make sure to point out that there's no other really good way to do it in PHP using you're own classes/methods).
- ereckers 13y agoThere goes the neighborhood.
- amish 13y agoTo all the PHP haters. Feel free to bask in the glory of knowing pointers and monads like the back of your hand, and leave making useful apps and making money to PHP developers. That's fine with me :)
- paulyg 13y agoWhy does every PHP thread turn into a bashing session? It's not constructive to the conversation. I for one am excited about this. I'm only half way through the docs buy so far I like what I see compared to other PHP PaaS. Except no mbstring.
- xlevus 13y agoHave you tried mb_string?
- quackerhacker 13y agoI like PHP! It's the first OO programing that I learned and paved the way for me learning C, C#, Obj-C...and now I'm studying Java. If it wasn't for Php's loose declarations (as compared to C) than I would have had a harder time to grasp object oriented programming and would've never made it past javascript.
- eevee 13y agoI wonder whether the target audience here is developers who want to build a new PHP application from scratch for GAE, or just people who want to install Wordpress? Using GAE adds a development/deployment step, but the lack of deployment fuss is the primary advantage PHP has over anything else. I'm also slightly alarmed that the PHP examples use htmlspecialchars and nothing else. The Python documentation has a whole section on templating with an example autoescaping setup using Jinja2.
- TheHydroImpulse 13y agoPHP as just started to get a package community going (Composer) but it's incredibly slow. Using external packages in PHP isn't as easy as with other platforms.
- eevee 13y agoSurely Google could just preinstall something. The Python templating docs say GAE includes both Jinja2 and the Django template engine.
- anuraj 13y agoLearn to write code - languages won't matter then. A spade is a spade whatever it is made of.