After discovering a few Google I/O conference presentations on Youtube something that grabbed my attention were the Google App Engine presentations. The Google App Engine allows developers to run their apps on Google’s infrastructure and not have to worry about server-related issues such as maintaining fast response times, reliability and scaling should your site suddenly receive a shed load of traffic. This is surely great news for startups who believe they will be big sometime in the future but aren’t willing to pay a silly amount of dough for the architecture to support their idea up-front, kinda like pay as you go…did I say the first 5 million page views and 500MB storage were free??

It’s not as flexible as Amazon’s Web Services and currently the Google App Engine only supports apps written in Python at the moment, a bit of a pain of the ass for me considering I’m a PHP developer. The PHP community seems pretty gutted Google App Engine doesn’t have a PHP runtime but when you consider the main man of Python (Guido) works at Google and PHP isn’t allowed to be used inside the walls of Google, it makes sense Google initially decided to support Python, adding shoddy PHP runtime support just to shut up PHP developers up won’t help anyone.

If you’re a PHP developer then check out the post about lack of PHP support in google app engine by Manuel Lemos,. Manuel mentions the ways you could let Google know you are litterally dying for PHP support, and also something pretty important, don’t be a beeyatch and get into language wars saying how PHP isbetter than Python or vice versa. Surely just give Python a try and see if it’s works for you and your particular task…I know I’ll be working through the GAE (one of the most unfortunate IT-related abbreviations I can think of, know of any others?) getting started guide.

Having previously missed out on the 10 000 developer signup for the beta I’m off to grab a piece of this much hyped GAE action while I can. Watch this space for my first GAE app.

Update: Adam Charnock made a post on his blog about ongoing talks between Zend and Google about adding PHP support to GAE. He suggests Zend is release some new products in Autumn so I wouldn’t expect them to release anything GAE-related before then, but you never know!
http://porteightyeight.com/archives/201-PHP-for-Google-App-Engine-in-the-works.html