Google App Engine finally supports PHP

http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/17/google-app-engine-finally-supports-php-the-language-that-runs-75-of-the-web/

by SmeelBe • 13 years ago

72 78 13 years ago

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.

flixic2• 13 years ago

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.

gngeal3• 13 years ago

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

flixic2• 13 years ago

Oh, yes, you are totally right. For some reason I mixed these rankings in my mind.

voidlogic2• 13 years ago

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....

markdown2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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).

markdown2• 13 years ago

> 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.

bink-lynch• 13 years ago

I too was concerned about lock in; however, it is really not that bad. I have been on AppEngine from the moment they supported Java. I created an abstraction layer between my program logic and whatever services it uses. This has allowed me to take the exact same compiled jars and run them on AppEngine using the datastore for persistence or in some other servlet container using SQL Server for persistence.

Just one additional advantage of using this approach is that I can use text files for testing and the program logic doesn't know the difference.

That's how I got rid of the lock in issue.

RyanZAG• 13 years ago

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...

jrockway3• 13 years ago

if you don't use the key-value datastore you give up a lot of the scaling advantages of appengine

I'm not sure what you mean by the key-value datastore. Do you mean memcache, or do you mean the HR datastore?

ceejayoz• 13 years ago

> 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.

I find a lot of folks aren't aware of https://developers.google.com/cloud-sql/

salimmadjd• 13 years ago

Agreed with targeting bloggers to enterprise! I had similar comments as yours when the news first came out, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5714729

amish• 13 years ago

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

krapp• 13 years ago

well, it doesn't entirely suck...

danbruc7• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

danbruc7• 13 years ago

There may be some insane parts contributing to the success but I can not even imagine a world in that all of them would contribute to the success.

PHP: a fractal of bad design [1] lists many - really many - broken things for which at least I am unable to see how the behavior could not cause headaches let alone contribute to the success of PHP. Go ahead and read it - it is long but entertaining.

[1] http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

xaritas• 13 years ago

I don't think that's the insane part. When I think of 'insanity' and 'PHP' together what usually comes to mind is: ambiguous semantics for common operations, dubious security practices, irritating syntax, inscrutable runtime.

There are some nice ideas in there, though. I dislike PHP-the-language as much as the next guy but sometimes you just need a three page website that you can hand off to a junior developer or web designer. If there is a language that does this, without being PHP, that would be awesome, but I don't think there is so I completely understand why somebody would just write three .php files rather than... install ruby, passenger, configure nginx, some supervisor script, etc. etc.

I think that Google Apps for Business + GAE services complement PHP nicely--now you can use that shell scripting core to tie together your data with some powerful APIs and basically have no operational worries. We'll see what they do with it. Maybe the next Facebook will start out as a three page website on AppEngine.

Killswitch3• 13 years ago

We get it, you don't like PHP. Move on already.

PommeDeTerre5• 13 years ago

No, it's good for people to be extremely vocal about technologies riddled with serious flaws. It's unfortunate, but ultimately beneficial, even when they have to do this repeatedly.

It doesn't matter if we're talking about PHP or JavaScript, or a web framework like Ruby on Rails, or various NoSQL databases, or even certain operating systems.

Even if people have used such technologies with some degree of success in the past, and even if they may still be using them today, it's important for us to move past them, as a community and as an industry.

Making their flaws widely known is a very good step toward moving to better technologies. So I encourage people to be vocal about their bad experiences, or about the flaws they see in technology. It's an important part of advancement.

thenomad2• 13 years ago

So, serious question - what language is better for small limited-scope web coding right now?

I don't mean major, fully-fledged app stuff, I mean simple CMSes, on-page loops / conditionals, <? echo $_GET["foo"] ?>, etcetera.

I'm no hardcore uber-coder, but I know enough to know there are languages I prefer to use than PHP. Personally, I like Ruby. But for a bit of quick glue or a relatively simple bit of web coding, I simply can't figure out what you'd use instead of PHP - and I assume from the number of "PHP sucks" comments that there must be such simple options?

Joeboy2• 13 years ago

> I mean simple CMSes, on-page loops / conditionals, <? echo $_GET["foo"] ?>, etcetera.

Serious return question - who has requirements like that? In my experience CMSes are never simple, and I can't think what kind of site has the latter requirements, but only has those requirements and won't ever need any more functionality.

Personally I'd maybe use something like Django + the Flatpages app for a "simple CMS", and a tiny wsgi app for adding simple logic to a web page. Not, to be honest, because they're a perfect fit for those particular tasks but because I'd get to use a sensible language (python) that will remain sensible for the majority of other tasks (including non-web based ones).

jrockway3• 13 years ago

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

Python?

sambe• 13 years ago

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

jrockway3• 13 years ago

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

velodrome• 13 years ago

Python, Java

voidlogic2• 13 years ago

My understanding is Google uses: Python, Java, C++ and Go and language choice is at the discretion of team involved.

joeblau2• 13 years ago

Guido van Rossum (Python Inventor) worked at Google--That's why they went Python.

tnuc• 13 years ago

They went Python long before Guido started working there.

hugorodgerbrown• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure that the original scraping scripts that Larry Page and Sergey Brin worked on (before Google was called Google) were written in Python. (Although I can't find the reference I read about that, so could be mistaken.)

[UPDATE] According to Wikipedia (judge for yourself), Larry Page is quoted as saying:

    "BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs
    on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux."

, back in 1996 whilst he was still at Stanford (Backrub being the original project name).

aviraldg• 13 years ago

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."

ppradhan• 13 years ago

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

PommeDeTerre5• 13 years ago

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.

shocks5• 13 years ago

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.

jakejake• 13 years ago

Most of the rants against PHP don't have many specific technical reasons mentioned. Some do, but when you provide specific facts it's much easier to argue against them. So I think it's more convenient to stick with "PHP sucks."

My theory is that people ranting about PHP are mainly in three categories - the first being developers who have never used PHP. The second are people who used PHP back in 1998 and haven't never really checked out any any modern PHP frameworks. The rest are developers who inherit a horrible codebase written in PHP. So they're gripes are a combination of their own horribly-written codebase they're stuck maintaining along with PHP-specific complaints.

PHP definitely has its quirks but there is interesting work happening with the language and many frameworks. I do quite a bit of PHP coding at the moment but previously in my career I've been full time Java developer, C# developer and even now I write quite a lot of Objective C. I have hated things about every one of those platforms. Every one of them offers the opportunity to write horrible code. I think developers tend to be very judgmental and opinionated anyway, but PHP gets too much flak. If you're not using it then who cares, why should it bother you what other people are doing?

joeblau2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

6ren• 13 years ago

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

Kiro3• 13 years ago

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.

danbruc7• 13 years ago

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.

Kiro3• 13 years ago

I would still say that for most people these flaws are no game-changer. We simply don't code stuff advanced enough for it to matter.

pornel• 13 years ago

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.

sbarre4• 13 years ago

> 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?

The above has much less to do with PHP and more to do with the lack of experience of the developers, I would say..

"Tools as good as possible" is an extremely subjective thing, and there is no magical tool or framework that works perfectly in all hands.

Developers should choose the tools that are best suited to the job at hand, and "best suited" doesn't just mean the functionality and features, it also encompasses developer proficiency.

sethrin• 13 years ago

This is true. But it's HN so if you say that, you have to dress it up a bit, throw in some jargon and name-drop some computer scientists -- "Turing-complete" counts for both categories, and is even somewhat relevant to the topic.

It's also not true. "Infinite are the arguments of sages," I hear, or something to that effect, but the distinguishing mark of expertise is not being able to offer an unqualified endorsement of any position.

The element of your comment that I find most concerning is that, after five years of using a programming language, I feel that you should be aware of its major flaws. Probably the minor flaws too. You should be aware of how it differs from other equivalent tools. And, if you don't know that, then the content of your post should not be "PHP is good," but "Why is PHP considered to be bad?"

Kiro3• 13 years ago

I do know the major flaws, it's just that they have never been a problem when I code stuff. I don't find myself thinking "oh, PHP is so bad" or that I can't do what I want because the language is flawed. I've used RoR, Django, Node.js but for the stuff I do (as I said, I'm no hardcore programmer) PHP simply works better or at least as good for me.

kami8845• 13 years ago

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

daw___• 13 years ago

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.

Nux• 13 years ago

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

Google App Engine finally supports PHP

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