Hands-on With App Engine’s New Runtime | Hacker News Reader

Hands-on With App Engine’s New Runtime

developers.google.com

It's PHP.

They want the wordpress crowd.

I think it's a very smart move. In the real world, outside of the startup bubble, there is a need for a simple, scalable php hosting that never gets slashdotted.

I agree. Ruby would be illogical seeing as they already have Python which is pretty similar. PHP would bring in a totally different crowd.

I do think there is enough an overload of PHP hosting though, even good php hosting, so the competition will be fierce.

Yup, PHP, the folder is already in the 1.7.8 sdk

Why would anyone lock themselves to a Google-only infrastructure now?

Because it might be the best option for a next few years? I'm not saying it is, but some people did a right choice "locking" themselves to Adobe-only infrastructure (Flash), Apple-only infrastructure (iOS/Objective-C), Microsoft-only infrastructure (Windows/Office/.NET), ...

When you're on the client side you don't have much of a choice. On the server, there are various options.

And even then, GAE is more risky than, say, .Net - since you never actually buy the platform, you're subject to Google's changing prices and product priorities.

Discontinuing Reader was one thing, but there are certain services that Google couldn't discontinue without it irreparably damaging the company among either consumers or business. Reader was close to being that, but at the end of the day no ones business depended on Google Reader, and mainstream consumers barely read Google News. Reader wasn't mainstream.

App Engine? If Google ever wanted to discontinue it, they would likely spin it off in some way. A company like Rackspace would surely be glad to take it off their hands.

Because you can host your App Engine applications on other platforms yourself?

http://www.jboss.org/capedwarf

http://www.appscale.com/

Also, I recommend developing for App Engine as an educational experience. Building a good App Engine application may seem a little bit constrained, but it teaches you a lot about how to make something fault-tolerant and able to scale horizontally.

There's no real lock-in as long as you cushion your application code from their APIs and infrastructure reasonably well. I was worried about lock-in myself with a side-project I took on a year ago. I decided to go with with GAE despite experience with raw AWS, just because I was a one-man-team about an hour a day, and didn't have time for all the technical overhead. But I made sure that I could switch to more flexible hosting without much difficulty. Their Datastore might be the hardest to abstract away if you rely on it too much, so I wrapped it inside a non-queryable blob API that could really have any kind of backend to it.

Any new information on which language it is out yet?

Might be Ruby?

Javascript / Dart?

They say popular so it can't be Dart.

My bet is on node.js meaning JavaScript :)

That seems closer

AppEngine is not build to support node.js async model, my bet is on Ruby.

I'm not a web developer so I have to ask whether Ruby is that different from Python so that another tool chain gets added and maintained.

Edit: your point about node.js makes sense though.

I've never used App Engine before -- what is it about its design that precludes Async?

Knowing that the V8 team dislike javascript so much that they created Dart (and Lars Bak says this openly), it's hard for me to think about google including node.js to AppEngine

Because noone can order anyone at Google to work on anything except what he likes to?

The only thing that's sure: it's not PHP.

Made me smile and giggle :)

Idiot me, it was PHP!

My bet is on Ruby, though I would love to see Python3 on the platform.

C# / .net runtime.

Seriously, why not provide a migration path from Azure.

It's Go. Experimental now.

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